In a new initiative, "LibreOffice HardHacks", the LibreOffice developers are being called on to take on the harder bugs in the LibreOffice code. Bjoern Michaelsen announced the programme, which is complementary to an earlier successful project "LibreOffice Easy Hacks", which set out to get the "low hanging fruit" bugs, the ones that would be easy to resolve and would bring new developers on board.

The HardHacks initiative is designed to take on the opposite end of the bug-fixing difficulty scale; every two weeks, the QA team will be finding the five most critical bugs that need attention. The qualifying bugs have to be among the most annoying bugs and must have been triaged as much as possible with reproduction scenarios or details of the regression. Once the five bugs have been identified they will be handed over to the core developers who will have to report back within the week, even if the response is "this bug needs more information" or "this bug can't be fixed because...". The idea is to keep the critical bugs in the developer's mind.

Michaelsen acknowledges that "these are the bugs that even the core developers have a healthy dose of respect of," but suggests that any developer in the LibreOffice community should feel free to take them on, adding: "these bugs are really hard nuts to crack, so failure is an option here". The first batch of bugs will be presented at the next weekly ESC (Engineering Steering Committee) call, and details should appear in the minutes.

(djwm)