Darshan Upadhyay
Collabora Office isn’t new — it’s been powering productive work for years. But this week marks something different: the development infrastructure now lives under its own roof. A new Gerrit instance, a migrated CI, a fresh renamed main branch, and a new Technical Committee making decisions in the open. The tools have moved, the community has arrived, and the code is already flowing.
Here’s how the first week went.
New Gerrit, Clean Slate
On April 2nd we went live with gerrit.collaboraoffice.com — our own code review home. Developers can log in with their GitHub account, set their email, upload an SSH key, and start submitting patches right away. Development happens on main, keeping things clean and simple.
CI: Up and Running
Continuous Integration was migrated over on day one. There were a few early bumps — a C++ compiler issue caused by two patches auto-merging with a header rename collision — but the team sorted it out quickly. Szymon is also currently tracking down some Cypress desktop test failures across builds, though these seem to have been fixed by Caolán over the weekend. The feedback loop for contributors is working and improving daily.
286 Commits Merged — 26 Contributors — One Week
Let that sink in. In just seven days, 286 commits have landed in main, with another 122 changes currently open for review.
Thanks to everyone who hit the ground running: Noel Grandin, Mike Kaganski, Tomaž Vajngerl, Balázs Varga, Caolán McNamara, Stephan Bergmann, Andras Timar, Ujjawal, Karthik Godha, Bayram Çiçek, Tor Lillqvist, Vivek, Samuel Mehrbrodt, Dennis Francis, Gökay Şatır, Gülşah Köse, Henry Castro, Jan Holesovsky, Jaume Pujantell, Justin Luth, Michael Meeks, Miklos Vajna, Mohit Marathe, Năstasie Raul-Ionuț, and Skyler Grey.
Matrix Is Alive
One of the most exciting things this week has been the energy on Matrix (#cool-dev). Developers are actively chatting — not about politics, but about how to improve the product. Debugging, reviewing, coordinating, helping newcomers get set up. It feels like a real developer community having fun, because it is one.
First Technical Committee Meeting — Full of Energy
The TC held its inaugural meeting this week. People showed up ready to work: Michael Stahl, Michael Meeks, Andras, Stephan, Samuel Ruegger, Thibaut Piernot, Szymon, Tomaž (Quikee), Dennis, Darshan, Hubert, and Andreas K. Here’s what was discussed:
Releases on Track
Andras is continuing stable branch releases as normal, and a 26.04 Beta is planned before COOL-days. The goal is to release a new Collabora Office from the same 26.04 code-base — for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Monorepo: One Repo to Rule Them All
Work is underway to bring the source code for COOL and Collabora Office into a single git repository. Most reviewers prefer Gerrit, so the plan is to move everything there, with GitHub becoming a read-only mirror. Dictionaries and help content will be merged in, while translations stay separate. Andras is already planning how to reflect this in the build system, with work starting immediately.
Patch Review: Catching Up Fast
Around 100 open patches on Gerrit and 127 on GitHub — the team is working hard to catch up on reviews after the migration. Darshan is tracking patches without reviewers (about 16 currently) and exploring ways to improve the welcome experience for new contributors — including a new GitHub Action that greets first-time contributors.
Code Quality and Modernization
Dennis is converting the last remaining jQuery-based context menus to the internal JSDialog framework — just three more call-sites to go. He’s also driving JS-to-TypeScript conversions, with patches already in review. Less tech debt, cleaner code.
Removing Poppler — Simplifying the Stack
The team decided to drop Poppler in favor of pdfium as the sole PDF backend. Maintaining two PDF libraries meant double the security surface for no real benefit. Caolán has already done significant work on pdfium import-to-draw. One less dependency, one less attack vector.
PDF Rendering and the Font Rabbit Hole
Tomaž is deep in PDF primitive rendering and uncovered font handling issues affecting paragraph spacing and slide layouts — specifically, different Carlito font versions in Flatpak versus other builds. The root cause goes deep into how edit engine picks between multiple font tables. A fix is in progress, with care being taken around backward compatibility.
COWASM: Offline Transitions
Stephan is working on COWASM and on/off-line transitions — getting that into CODA-Q — pushing forward the vision of Collabora Office working seamlessly whether you’re connected or not.
New Faces Digging In
What stood out most was new contributors already rolling up their sleeves. Samuel Ruegger is diving into the codebase, finding and fixing bugs on the Linux desktop. Thibaut Piernot is exploring the inner workings of the project, curious and ready to contribute. This is exactly the kind of energy that makes open source thrive.
What Everyone Is Working On
The meeting closed with a glimpse into what people are working on — the list was long: RTF fixes, performance backports, code cleanup, view-mode bug fixes, TypeScript migrations, infrastructure monitoring, and more. Nobody is waiting around. Everyone has something they’re building, fixing, or improving.
Full minutes are published for everyone to read: 👉 TC Meeting Minutes
This is how we work — openly, with the community.
Get Involved
The door is wide open. If you want to contribute to an open source project where people are writing code, reviewing patches, and shipping software — not arguing about governance — this is the place.
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Community page: collaboraonline.github.io/post/communicate/
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Forum: forum.collaboraonline.com
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Chat on Matrix: #cool-dev:matrix.org
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Browse open changes: gerrit.collaboraoffice.com
Drop by Matrix if you have questions — we’re happy to help you get started. See you in the code.
