Hi all devs,
I know we all wait for the code and the missing contributions from
Oracle. But no reason to plan ahead.
One think I like to see is the removal of the binfilter module after the
code has been contributed.
Reasoning
The binfilter module is a huge set of code duplicated from all
application modules and various high level
modules. It's main purpose is to implement load and store of pre xml
binary document formats
from the StarOffice era. Removing this code would spare us a lot of work
while we try to have our
first release buildable and running.
Caveats
While replaced by xml formats way back in 2002, there are still
documents in the binary format
around so at least loading them may be a requirement for some users.
There is a consensus
that only the import part is needed, but removing just the export part
is tedious work so no
one has done it yet.
Proposal
I suggest to remove the binfilter module after the code has been
provided under the AL.
Therefore we have it inside the SVN and could re activate it later.
Preferable as a separate
extension.
Technical Background
The binfilter module was created by copying all application code that
was involved in loading
and storing the binary document format. That code was then striped down
to only handle
the persistence part including the streaming operations. During import,
the complete document
was streamed into memory using the old implementation. Then the
binfilter copy of the xml filter
transformed the in memory model into a temporary OpenOffice.org xml
stream. This stream was
then imported by the current document implementation.
The reason for the invention of binfilter was the high coupling of the
binary format and
the model implementation. Changing the actual implementation started to
get harder as the
binary document format was nearly a 1:1 memory dump of the model. So
putting all the
binary stream operators aside enabled us to make drastic changes to the
model implementation.
While the binfilter only communicates with the office code using xml, it
still is highly dependent
as it uses some low level modules. Therefore each time those modules
change, the binfilter
module must be rebuild. Some developers, including me, proposed to have
all needed modules
cloned into the binfilter module. To have a completly independent
extension that does not need
to be build when the office itself is build.
Christian.
