LibreOffice developers gathered for its annual HackFest in Berlin last weekend, and one result that will help all contributors is online documentation for its API.

The new documentation covers the complete LibreOffice 3.4 API, has reference documentation for the Java UNO Runtime and C++ UNO runtime systems, and an overview of the UNO development tools.

Other achievements of the hackfest include enhancements to the Visio Import filter, additional RTF support and unit test improvements for Calc plus some bug fixes.

While it had been widely assumed that the OpenOffice.org code donated by Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation would make its way into LibreOffice, an analysis by Michael Meeks of the codebases of two projects suggests that they are diverging at a rate that will make it difficult to exchange code.

Meeks, who is a LibreOffice developer at Novell, claims that LibreOffice developers have removed some 526,000 lines of OpenOffice.org code and added approximately 290,000 new lines, including a filter for Lotus Word Pro, VBA improvements, a new RTF filter and gtk3 code.

He concludes that the amount of code-change and cleanup provides "a lot of scope for conflict" when merging changes. So, rather that automatically including the code committed to Apache in LibreOffice, Meeks envisages that it will be a case of  "cherry-picking and porting only those things that justify the effort, as/when/if there is any such thing".

Related articles:

LibreOffice 3.4.0 released

Oracle hands over OpenOffice to community

OpenOffice.org voted into Apache Incubator

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