On 06.08.2011 19:45, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
With regard to consumption versus production, I agree that it is easy
to stop supporting production when no native consumers are likely to
be available any longer and the OpenOffice.org document model evolves
to support expanded functionality of further ODF specifications.
the export filters in binfilter were to be disabled for OOo 3.4 anyway,
which should already be the case in OOo 3.4 beta.
So if we propose to retire binfilters, we need some way to make it
clear that is happening and what the workarounds are for someone who
finds themselves in need. And we definitely need to keep it in a
form where someone could revive it at a later time, even if only part
of some sort of document-forensics and -recovery/conversion effort
rather than integrated into future releases.
yes, needs to be added to the release notes.
it will of course be retrievable as part of the first AOOo source
release, and from SVN.
This is not the last time we will need to deal with this (and the
same fate could eventually befall the native format currently
supported by OpenOffice.org.)
you mean OpenOffice.org XML format?
it's implemented in the "xof" library as a rather simple wrapper around
the ODF import/export filter, mostly mangling namespaces and tweaking
some attributes, and shouldn't cause much maintenance effort.
Also, if there are available specifications, whatever their quality,
we probably need to see to their preservation as well.
for the binary SO formats it wouldn't surprise me if the specification
were the source code (but that was far before my time, so i wouldn't
know if a real spec exists...).
all the other old formats are foreign anyway.
- Dennis
another reason why i'd favor removing binfilter ASAP is that i suspect
most of these old filters were written in a less hostile time, so who
knows what security issues the code may have...
good thing binfilter is not installed by default nowadays.
regards,
michael
--
"It's very hard to review carefully this kind of boilerplate code.
Because it's really, really dull. You basically can't pay people
enough to carefully review dull code. We've tried. It does not work.
There's some kind of very strong mental habit that causes people to
just kind of gloss over the repeated bits. [...] So avoiding
boilerplate is key, and ML is very good at that." -- Yaron Minsky
