Jens-Heiner Rechtien <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Thorsten Behrens wrote: > > Hm - hard to estimate how many of those binary documents are still in > > active use. And it would be interesting if they are kept just because > > of laziness, or for good reasons (I clearly suspect the former). > > Laziness is a good reason. No one is going over back up tapes just for > converting old documents ... as long as it is reasonably safe to > assume it's still safe to open the old documents. "Active use" is a > misleading term here. I still want to be able to look into - let's say > - old exchanges with the tax authorities but I wouldn't ever want to > change these documents. Be able to do that without fiddling around > with an old version of OpenOffice.org is a major convenience. > Hi Heiner,
sure, I see your point. And I'm not against it, in principle. But this whole topic is, in the end, a tradeoff between build time, maintenance effort, download size & time, contributor-friendliness, and, of course, how we treat our user base. There will be a point in time when we'll drop support for our legacy file formats, just like MS dropped support for 16bit applications. It's not a question of 'if', it's a question of 'when'. And as a developer, I tend to favor the 'earlier', rather than 'later' scheme - because it frees us to focus on the issues that affect large fractions of our user base, rather than minorities... ;-) > Before we drop our own legacy filters (which would be a major > inconvenience for "lazy" long time office users) we should think hard > about obsolete 3rd party filters which could be removed without > alienating our own user base. > Sure. > > b) move _all_ modules below binfilter into that module, possibly after > > stripping them to the necessary minimum. Build it once, and tuck it > > into a safe place (comes close to a, but is smaller & integrates > > with OOo3). > > Unrealistic, because rebuilding the binfilters might be necessary for > all kind of reasons: compiler changes, base line changes, bug fixes, > new platforms etc. Over long it would be part of the regular build > again, now only bigger than ever before. > Well, only if it is an in-process component. Mathias already mentioned the stand-alone converter idea... Cheers, -- Thorsten --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
