Frank Schönheit - Sun Microsystems Germany wrote:
Hi Stephan,
There is only a min version, see
<http://udk.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=features&msgNo=40>.
The rationale for not having a max version is that OOo's UNO interface
should generally be backward compatible.
which implies that UNO extensions can/should not use unpublished API,
right? Isn't this is somewhat too strong restriction?
Also, the restriction for our configuration isn't as strong as for UNO
API, so if an extension expects a certain configuration to work with,
and this changes in a future major update of OOo, then the extension
will break, too.
I suppose one can think of more things which contribute to an
extension's required environment, but are not guaranteed to be stable
over major OOo upgrades.
So: Shouldn't we introduce a max version?
The idea was to go with finer grained dependencies: If your extension
has a dependency on some foo which can change in future, three things
need to be done: 1 Introduce an XML element <foo-dependency> to be used
in extensions' description.xml. 2 Adapt the OOo code to support
<foo-dependency> (and drop that again once foo changes incompatibly). 3
Add <foo-dependency> to the description.xml of your extension.
Of course, this is a chicken-and-egg problem of sorts. For one, your
extension will not work in older OOo versions, even if they supported
foo the way your extension expects it (because the older OOo versions do
not support the <foo-dependency>). For another, if you want to use
features first introduced in OOo X for which nobody bothered to
simultaneously add an appropriate dependency to OOo X, you can use the
OOo-minimal-version dependency sledgehammer. For a third, it seemed
just not feasible to add fine grained dependencies for each and every
conceivable situation up front. Maybe, once again, theory clashes with
practice...
Lesson to take away? When you are writing an extension today (that
shall work with OOo 2.3, for example, and working with < OOo 2.3 is not
the most urgent requirement), and you use some feature of OOo that may
change incompatibly in the future, see that the 1--2--3 above gets done
(all together in the OOo 2.3 timeframe)!
See <http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=17677>.
Just updated
<http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Extensions_packaging>.
-Stephan
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