Package directory modes ======================= The packages can be built directly from a set of git checkouts (vcs mode), or from a set of release tarballs (tarball mode). Vcs mode is useful if you want to work on libreoffice during the development cycle. You can check out the latest sources and track them while you make changes. Tarball mode is used to prepare packages of official libreoffice releases from the tarballs created by upstream. Source package creation steps for tarball mode ============================================== The .orig.tar.gz consists of the (separate) source tarballs available from The Document Foundation from http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/ or base on an old version and add/remove the files manually and/or symlink to the old version if this didn't change - see git diff of download.lst. This is even better given we probably want to add only needed stuff there, and not all tarballs (most of those we don't use) See the "Format: 3.0 (quilt)" section dpkg-source(1) for more details. Package directory layout - vcs mode =================================== In vcs mode we are working directly from checkouts of the libreoffice sources. We pull in sources to these places: "top" directory - checkout of LO's "core" repo debian - git packaging repository from pkg-openoffice project on alioth helpcontent2 - checkout of LO's "help" repo (git submodule) translations - checkout of LO's "translations" repo (git submodule) tarballs - see above in tarball mode $ git clone git://gerrit.libreoffice.org/core $ cd core $ git submodule init (maybe remove dictionaries again, see .git/config, we don't need it here.) ./g pull -r (git pull -r, but also does the necessary steps for the submodules) For tarballs/, see above