On 17.06.2011 07:51, Greg Stein wrote:
Over and over, people keep saying "OO.o is a HUGE COMPLICATED piece of code. IT IS A MESS. HARD TO WORK WITH." and that kind of thing. Either they are trying to scare people off, show how awesome they are that they can deal with it, or they're simply telling the truth. I tend to believe people, so everything built up in my head is that we're going to have a really, really hard time to build and release this thing.
OOo *is* huge and complicated. Partially because parts of its code base are a mess, partially because a huge application with so many features is not an easy matter. I doubt that any huge word processor will have a code base that unexperienced developers can work on immediately.
Nevertheless, most parts we have to remove due to license constraints are well separated from the other code. With a few exceptions (you mentioned regexp) they are not even part of the code base, but are provided as external source tarballs and their libraries often are encapsulated by a small OOo library that exports a stable interface to the rest of the code.
So replacing LGPL code will take the time it needs to write and test the new code, but the size or the degree of mess in the code base will play only a minor role. The "messy" parts only rarely directly interact with LGPL code.
Nevertheless, assuming that it will take several months is a good estimation. I refuse to predict the exact number of months. :-)
Disclaimer: I know a lot of OOo code. But of course I don't know every piece of it. So I might be totally wrong for those parts I don't know.
Regards, Mathias
