Darshan Upadhyay
Less than two months since we stood up gerrit.collaboraoffice.com and the momentum keeps building. This week brought a major infrastructure milestone — GitHub is now read-only — the crash count has been cut in half, the design system is taking shape, and new contributors keep arriving. Here’s the Week #4 roundup.
GitHub Is Now Read-Only
The migration to Gerrit is officially complete. The GitHub online repository is now read-only. For those who prefer browsing code on GitHub, there’s a read-only mirror at github.com/CollaboraOnline/online.mirror.
A few things to note about the mirror:
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online.mirror does not accept PRs — all code contributions go through gerrit.collaboraoffice.com
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online.mirror does not have issues — bug reports and feature requests stay on the original CollaboraOnline/online repository to keep existing
cool#references in commit messages working -
Code contributions to the old online repo should stop — the main branch is already closed
There are still around 60 open PRs on GitHub’s main branch that need to be closed and recreated on Gerrit. If you have any old PRs there, now is the time to move them over.
The Numbers
This week: 275 commits merged by 40 contributors, with 218 open changes in review. All-time since April 2nd: 2,149 commits merged from 61 contributors.
The TC noted 8 new contributors joining just this week: Dragos Alexandru Onu, Gabriel, Libre, Matei Vasiliu, Nistor Mario Peter, Ron Dallas, Stefan Alexandru Vladut, and reducedradius.
CODE 26.04: First RC Expected
The first release candidate of CODE 26.04 is expected shortly, with Andras starting the release process and weekly RCs planned after that.
Anna flagged some freezing issues in Writer, Calc, and Impress that are being investigated, with the main performance blocker already resolved by Caolán.
Crash Testing: 547 → 282
Last time we reported crash testing dropping from 776 to 547. This week it’s down to 282 — 401 crashes fixed with only 163 new ones found. That’s a steady, systematic march toward stability.
CI: Windows and Android Now Building
Monorepo CI now has Windows and Android builds working alongside Linux. Caolán and Szymon are tackling Cypress test stability, with several fixes landed and more in progress.
The team is exploring ways to improve the CI workflow: a possible Jenkins plugin to prioritize test fixes, splitting Cypress tests into desktop/mobile/multi-user categories so failed suites can be resumed independently, and better announcements of test fixes on Matrix so developers know when to rebase.
Design System: Taking Shape
The weekly UX/UI Design Meeting is driving real, visible progress on the design system:
Icon Blueprint: Ivana and Pedro are building an icon specification — a Figma spec for designers and an SVG template for anyone working in Inkscape, so that anyone can create or improve icons following consistent metrics. Ivana designed new section icons (rename, move up, move down, remove) already submitted to Gerrit. The KDE icon guidelines are being referenced as a model.
Cursor Spec Published: The cursor design rules, grid specs, and examples are now publicly available at collaboraoffice.org/design-with-us — ready for any contributor to pick up and work with.
Dynamic Zoom Progress: Sahil’s Impress dynamic zoom is in review with all Cypress tests finally passing. Writer dynamic zoom concerns raised earlier by Timur are now resolved. When dynamic zoom is toggled on in settings, the default zoom dropdown disables cleanly.
Ruler and Field Shading: The team is discussing how to make the ruler easier to understand — margins vs. indentation vs. tab stops — and rethinking field shading with a move toward a simpler single toggle for content control visibility.
Sidebar Layout: Andreas K. raised sidebar alignment inconsistencies, prompting a broader discussion about layout guidelines that account for both desktop and mobile wizard views. The team is also working on bringing table styles from the sidebar into the notebookbar’s Table tab.
What Developers Are Building
Vector Rendering — First Change Landed: Tomaž got the first JavaScript primitive rendering change merged. This is the foundation for client-side vector rendering — lots more primitives to add, but it’s real and it’s in.
Pivot Table Formatting: Tomaž also improved cell formatting for pivot table subtotals and grand totals — practical Calc improvements that users will notice.
jsuno Built by Default: Stephan’s JS extension example is on Gerrit, and jsuno now builds by default on Linux. Still experimental at runtime, but the groundwork for JavaScript-based extensions is in place.
Windows Shell Extensions: Andras got shell extensions working with CODA-W, along with crash fixes.
Safari Print Fix — Deeper: Attila dug further into the Mac Safari print issue. The root cause: Safari snapshots the frame before the document finishes painting. Waiting for the iframe load event wasn’t enough — the fix now waits for two paint cycles. CI was green, then red again. Cross-browser work.
Spellcheck Hang Fixed: Miklos fixed a hang during idle spellcheck in Writer — a subtle bug that’s hard to reproduce but ruins your day when it hits.
Multipage View: Sahil fixed comment boxes staying pinned at the top when scrolling in Writer’s multipage view. Darshan landed a fix to hide the context toolbar on scroll in multipage view and fixed readonly XLSX files opening in edit mode.
Remote Graphics Prompts: Caolán is nearly finished — just 3-4 patches left — on prompting users when a document would fetch remote graphics.
Accessibility: Bayram closed the Calc shape tab focus issue and submitted fixes for Format Cells dialog screen reader support. Caolán cleaned up Impress sidebar accessibility. Bayram is now tackling Impress sidebar layout defocus.
Code Cleanups Filed: The approved cleanups from the TC are now tracked as GitHub issues — PostgreSQL SDBC removal, Java wiki publisher removal, and comphelper::string cleanup are filed. Canvas/slideshow removal, report builder, and VCL XML-based theming are pending.
Shardul: Consistent and Growing
Worth calling out — Shardul (shardulvs) has been steadily active across multiple areas: drawing header/footer boundaries in Writer while editing, removing outdated content settings from the options dialog, fixing CSV scroll preview issues (merged), and now working on a “Show Boundaries” toggle for Writer’s View tab. This is what consistent open source contribution looks like.
Community Calls — All in the Open
Three weekly calls, all with published minutes:
TC Meeting (May 20) — GitHub mirror live, CI updates, crash testing, code cleanups, git hooks
Collabora Online Weekly Meeting (May 21) — 12 attendees — release schedules, PR migration, contributor updates
UX/UI Design Meeting (May 21) — 11 attendees — icon blueprint, dynamic zoom, cursors, ruler UX, field shading, sidebar layout
All minutes published on the forum under meeting-minutes. No closed doors.
Get Involved
61 contributors and counting. New people are landing patches every week.
Community page: collaboraonline.github.io/post/communicate/
Design system: collaboraoffice.org/design-with-us
Forum: forum.collaboraonline.com
Chat on Matrix: #cool-dev:matrix.org
Browse open changes: gerrit.collaboraoffice.com
See you in the code.
