What I managed to glean from the LibreOffice discussion lists is that binfilter will be separately installable but probably not taken to end-of-life. (As platforms change, it may be necessary to make new builds of it.)
There is also discussion about moving some annoying dependencies into the binfilter (and other converter) branches in some case, so they don't have to be maintained in sync with the main distro. This means there's potentially redundant maintenance. I am not sure where they went with that, and how far they can go with it. I also have no idea how the trees are being reorganized at LibreOffice. There is also a thrust to make converters more cleanly-separated and having the plugin APIs work successfully for them. Again, this is the gist of it. It doesn't seem too far from ideas that have been floated around here, though. I think we should have a mutual interest in coordinating more around this topic, since redundant development and maintenance of converters is a terrible tax on developer attention and resources. There is considerable interoperability impact, although maybe not so much for the very stable, near-ancient ones (although just staying up with RTF seems to be a serious challenge). - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Malte Timmermann [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2011 10:24 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: binfilter (was RE: OOO340 to svn) Binfilter will be good for many more time consuming discussions. Many different opinions on if/how to change them, many different opinions on if/why to keep them. Assuming that the binfilter source tree doesn't need clean-up because of IP / license issues, I suggest to simply keep the folder as it is, and think about further actions later. I really wouldn't spend resources on this topic now, as there are too many important things we need to achieve before. Not sure about the status of binfilter in LibreOffice - but IIRC, once the Linux distros where shipping Go-OO versions, they didn't include binfilters, and I can't imagine LibO being different here. As a side note - OOo 3.3 doesn't install binfilters per default anymore, and I can't remember anybody complaining/wondering/asking. In Oracle Open Office, we already had an EOL note for them. Malte. On 03.08.2011 18:19, eric b wrote: > > Le 3 août 11 à 17:49, Dennis E. Hamilton a écrit : > >> I believe LibreOffice is already taking action on binfilter, and it >> would be useful to see if we can match their approach. >> >> Also, I think there was (again on LibreOffice) a technical discussion >> on simplifying the dependencies. > > > I did a lot on simplifying the dependencies with OOo4Kids and OOoLight, > but before I need to know what you need to simplify. > > About binfilter, there are several issues : > > 1) the binfilter directory contains duplicated headers. I had a private > discussion about that with Jens Heiner Linkenau, aka ause, and I can > retrieve everything about the exact reasons why. > > 2) for compatibility reason, and as good compromise OpenOffice.org > should to continue to provide a way to "open" old format files > (staroffice 5.x for instance), and to propose to save them in a more > recent. > > 3) build binfilter means there are a lot of warnings, and warnings are > error. I worked a lot on remove warnings on binfilter, and I can help on > this side, if ever (or students can help for sure). > > > I got other ideas, about simplifying the build, but I'll keep them for a > best moment (too early now) > > >> This was initially by having redundancy, with the idea that a better >> refactoring would come later. > > > I must have missed some mails. What is the current plan ? > > > Regards, > Eric Bachard > >
