For some times, I'm fixing some simple bugs in OpenOffice.org. I'm starting to think that, with some help, any C++ developer could dive into OOo's code to fix such bugs. This would help the project to go even faster and bring some more connections between the users and the developers. I find it pretty hard to believe that there are only two developers among the OOo francophone NL project members. In order to verify that, I decided to create some OOo hackers group inside the Fr NL project. The principle is easy: experienced developers are mentoring the newcomers. This small team will discuss the bugs and features it will want to fix or implement inside the Fr project. The criteria for the bug selection are simple too: first take the issues in IssueZilla with numerous votes and the oldest ones. If you want to join that starting team, don't hesitate: jump in and send an email to present yourself to the dev@fr.openoffice.org mailing list. The interest to keep that team in the French NL project is that people who aren't comfortable with english will be able to be helped.

As all this small world will need to find some useful documentation to get the sources, build and hack OOo, I'll start a blogs posts / tutorial serie explaining how to do that. As I'm also a member of the Go-oo team, I'll of course give the details for the vanilla version of OOo, but also for Go-oo: this way everybody will be happy! All my machines are running openSUSE 11 or SLED 11 (guess why ;) ): then I'll provide the commands for this linux distribution... you are free to post comments for the other distros.

Until next time for the first step: Get the sources and build...