Am 06.08.2011 19:45, schrieb Dennis E. Hamilton:
" What does this show? Others behave much worse as we would do. If the
first AOO release will be the last with binfilters and we assume a
runnalble/installable state of 5-10 years (depending on OS, unforseeable
progress, etc...) this will be fine from my POV."
My concern about this rationale is that those of us who see no problem are
making a likely irreversible decision that impacts those who do and may not
even be aware of what we are doing.
Can never be excluded, we simply have no numbers. Remember, this means
we also have no numbers about how many people use it. No complains when
not installing it by default hints to no users.
OTOH we have numbers about time, space, bandwidth, buildtime
consumptions of binfilter. We know that it needs to be looked after.
Michael Stahl pointed to probable security relevant stuff in the old
binfilter parts (I guess he's right). We know that it builds with a lot
of warnings. Trying to remove those is ambitious, but OTOH dangerous,
may add errors to binfilters. Errors may be added by changes to
underlying modules with nearly no chance to find them. Even changing the
compiler may add unnoted errors.
In short: It does not come for free to simply keep it.
All in all:
Binfilter has done it's duty. It has allowed to do changes to the
internal core class hierarchy and more. It has allowed to have a
transition phase. Let's let it go...
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.
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.
Sure, agreed.
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.)
Also, if there are available specifications, whatever their quality, we
probably need to see to their preservation as well.
- Dennis
