Re: binfilter (was RE: OOO340 to svn)

[Armin Le Grand]

Am 05.08.2011 19:44, schrieb Marcus (OOo):
I hope that we still agree to keep the binfilters with our first Apache
release. Otherwise we would deplay it more than IMHO necessary.

Correct, full agreement. Sorry to have not mentioned that, but of course 
for the first release it should stay added. Not sure about the current 
state, seems as if it is installed optional with default to false. I'll 
need to check that ASASAA (As Soon As Sources Are Available :-))


After the first is done we can remove them for the 2nd official Apache
version. While we do many dev builds on the way (hopefully, like it was
with OOo) we can see if there are more problems that we have to take
into account.

Agreed.

In parallel we can make an announcement that the next version has
a) only support for importing the old binary file formats
- or -
b) no support for import and export.
Depends on what we want.

Agreed. I would just announce that it's the last version with binary 
filters, not really a neccesary to forbid writing from my POV.

Regards,
        Armin

Marcus



Am 08/05/2011 07:01 PM, schrieb Armin Le Grand:
Am 05.08.2011 18:47, schrieb Dennis E. Hamilton:
The only problem with [2] is that it assumes conversion is
possible/permissible. That is not always the case. Now, I do not know
there is anyone who has that problem and is (or will soon be) unable
to run older software that accesses those formats, but we do need to
be careful in considering this.

The current 3.2 version would be the last one to have both, how ling
will it be installable and runnable on evolving systems? Can only be
guessed, but usually it's another 7-8 years.

I have no numbers, but how many people still have files in old formats?
With introduction ODF years ago it was preselected as the standard.

When you load old files, change and safe them you are invited to use ODF
for the file save. The office was not even as widely spread as it is now
before ODF was added as default format, thus potentially much less
documents in the old formats were created, compared to ODF.

I think something like old file formats have to be deprecated one day,
and in my opinion there was a quite long conversion/transition period
now. As others already mentioned, binfilter is not even installed by
default for 3.2 (if I remember correctly), and I have not seen any
complaints about that yet.

To All: Does anyone use one of the old binary formats or knows anyone
who does actively nowdays? Please answer if you know about something
like that, this would be valuable input in this discussion.

Regards,
Armin

In the future, this problem will become more likely because conversion
is prevented by technical means, not just an usage case (e.g., when a
document is digitally-signed and the signature must be preserved).


- Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Armin Le Grand
[mailto:armin.le.gr...@me.com]
Sent: Friday, August 05, 2011 04:34
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: binfilter (was RE: OOO340 to svn)

Hi *,

Binfilter can pretty simply be linked statically against the remaining
dependencies (tools and below) and just stay there as a binary module.
It already is a UNO API based module, so having binfilter or not is just
a matter of copying the binaries or not during installation, plus maybe
some finetuning.

My initial suggestion was anyways to not add it as a module, but keep it
static on the version it was added in the past; being indirectly changed
by changing the below modules for other purposes is theoretically even
dangerous and may introduce errors.

Seen from today I see no reason at all to keep it; there are about 20
versions of OOo/other derivates out there which support it and thus
support converting documents. Everyone who still has old docs (few after
7-8 years I guess) is able to get a version before removal, install it
and convert those docs.

As discussed above, there are two possibilities (well, three, if we keep
it as it is):

[1] Do the not too difficult step of making binfilter independent from
the rest by statically linking, keep it on the current version. Use the
resulting binary module for future versions.

[2] Completely remove it and refer any complaints from people which were
not able to move to the new file formtats in the last 7-8 years to the
countless versions which are capable to do the conversion

Thus I clearly suggest to do [2] now, enough ressources (memory,
bandwidth, built time, ...) spent on it. Let's use the chance to cut
some old burdens.

BTW: Fo the interested I already mentioned some facts about it's history
here [news://news.gmane.org:119/iufajg$339$1...@dough.gmane.org]

Am 03.08.2011 21:17, schrieb Mathias Bauer:
On 03.08.2011 20:25, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:

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.)

Binfilter already is installable separately - on Windows it's an option
in the setup that you can disable (and AFAIK it is disabled by
default).
What you probably mean is that they are discussing to make binfilter a
component that is compatible cross versions and so does not need to be
installed each time when a new version of the office program is
installed.

As this currently fails due to some dependencies between binfilter and
"the rest of the office" that are not stable enough and might change in
every release, this ends up in the discussion you mentioned:

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.

That's nothing new and this has happened in the past already in several
cases. I did that by myself on several occasions. But this approach is
doomed to fail in at least two cases: GraphicObjects and vcl. At least
it would require to refactor large parts of the binfilter code to be
able to remove these dependencies. There are much more better places
where time could be invested better. [Remark: IMHO the GraphicObject
problem should be solvable with moderate effort, I doubt that this is
the case for vcl.]

But maybe this is just a problem because people want to see a problem
in it.

Though in theory binfilter creates some maintenance effort due to its
remaining dependencies on other code, I can't remember a lot of
necessary work on binfilter caused by these dependencies in the last
years. In the past we already went the "remove annoying dependencies"
road for binfilter: each time when a developer made huge changes in a
module that would require larger code adjustments in binfilter, the
module that was going to be changed was copied before the change and
the
unmodified copy was moved into binfilter (and hopefully ;-) stripped
from all code not used in binfilter later). As I wrote, this doesn't
work for the GraphicObject and vcl, but we already used it for most of
the bigger modules with a lot of code changes, so I don't expect a lot
of room for improvement here.

It should be mentioned that this approach only optimized the work
from a
maintencance cost POV, but it made things worse in other areas:
binfilter becomes bigger each time when a copied module was added,
increasing both build time and size of the installation set. And even
the optimization for maintenance cost is incomplete as the resulting
code duplication will require duplicated work in the future at least in
case security leaks are found (been there, done that ...).

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'm afraid that talking about stuff like this without actually knowing
the code will at best create confusion. So all I will say about that
here is:

We don't have converters, we have filters. And some of them are cleanly
separated already, some aren't. As long as the latter aren't going
to be
reimplemented anyway, there wouldn't be much sense in investing time
into improving their modularity.

Is binfilter the next "bike shed" we are targetting?

Regards,
Mathias

--
ALG



--
ALG


--
ALG