What has been coded in 2012? A lot.

(Brazilian developers State of the Union 2012)

It could not last too much to show up. In 2012 we were able to gather a group of volunteers developers interested in working in the code, re-factoring important parts of the code and fixing bugs. Today this group is ready to address new challenges in the code and work in its maintenance through support in level 3.

The group was scattered and dispersed, but gathered thanks to the crash-course on LibreOffice development that took place at FISL (International Forum of Open Source), where, besides making people come together and promote face-to-face conversation, we could show that the development of LibreOffice was now accessible to programmers of any skills, and no more a challenge for few fanatic aficionados. By end November, we gathered again in our first Hack-Day hosted by the SOLISC event.

We also had our bug-hunting session and a bug-hunting marathon by year end, in preparation for the forthcoming version 4.0 of LibreOffice, to be released by early February 2013. Yet, the Brazilian community need to make more strides in QA as the project has specialized tools based on Mozilla software for the matter and we need volunteers to execute the tests with the Brazilian packages.

We kept our translation completely up-to-date and revised, not only with the translation of the new features of the software but also with the improvements of the existing translation suggested by the community. Today Brazil owns the highest figure of LibreOffice downloads, above 2.5 Millions since January 25th, 2011 and with all versions released since then. We are effectively one of the largest, if not the largest community of LibreOffice users in the world (critics will say we do a lot of downloads).  Following this trend, we raised our downloads mirror servers from 5 to 8.

In a remarkable teamwork, our spelling checker VERO now got a Python grammar checker based on LightProof, which is available in other languages as well. The team is working in building the grammar rules (and exceptions) and already produced an interesting document with most common grammar errors – a must-read for those who are interested in improving their Portuguese skills.

In 2012 we reached the landmark of 300 patches since 2011 (200 of them in 2012), one new checker, 3 new mirrors and 5000 new words translated or revised. It is for us a genuine matter for pride and celebration.

Happy  2013 to all