Tom Davis remarks that he's noticed a couple of ODF-related bugs for 
LibreOffice and it is presumed that they have been fixed.  That's good to know.

I want to discourage the notion that the absence of format-related bugs says 
anything about conformance.  Most bugs users and developers encounter are 
related to OpenOffice.org in operation and not the way it supports the ODF 
format in particular.  That is natural.  Most users have no sense of what is 
ODF-related and what is not.  Developers are usually dealing with bugs that 
deal with visible operational behavior, not handling of the ODF format in terms 
of what the ODF specifications say.

I don't mean the level of conformance is not high, but that bug reports don't 
determine that.  (This is just like the absence of bug reports not being 
evidence that there are no bugs.)

 - Dennis

AN EXAMPLE

I am fairly heavily involved in how ODF packaging works.  This involves some 
specifically-structured XML files included in a Zip archive.  That's what .odt, 
.odp, and .ods files are.

As an example, here is a set of test documents that examine one aspect of 
resilience of packages.  They exercise one very tiny case of legal variations 
in the rules for XML.  The files help confirm that those variations are being 
handled properly: < 
http://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/svn/oic/TestSuite/trunk/odf12/NameSpaceResilience/>.

This file describes what the variations in the documents are:
<http://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/svn/oic/TestSuite/trunk/odf12/NameSpaceResilience/NameSpaceResilience.txt>

This web page describes the result of testing the 9 files against 10 different 
releases of ODF-supporting software:
< 
http://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/svn/oic/TestSuite/trunk/odf12/NameSpaceResilience/NameSpaceResilience-Results.htm>.

Now, almost all ODF implementations produce the variation in test-case 01.  The 
question is, do they consume the other two valid ones different than the ones 
they produce.  All but two accomplish that.

The six remaining cases involve invalid manifest documents according to the XML 
schema and the ODF specification.  In terms of resilience in the face of 
defects, the implementations are all over the map, as you can see.  These cases 
are not about conformance of course, because the inputs have defects.  But they 
do show something about resilience in the face of defects.  That can matter in 
how users are able to manage anyhow and especially if documents that are 
produced incorrectly (with regard to this simple case) turn up in the wild.

SUMMARY

This test goes beyond what a product produces, which may be valid, to look at 
what is valid that it does not produce.  Users of the same product will not see 
these cases unless there
is some odd change from one version of a release to another or there is 
interchange between different ODF-supporting products.

The score is pretty good for this one tiny aspect of conformance.  Resilience 
in the face of defects is a bonus category unrelated to conformance.

It takes (tens of) thousands of exercises like this to ferret out bugs in how 
valid ODF documents are handled by software that supports the format.  Or to 
confirm that provisions for correct documents are handled properly for a 
feature that is supported and resiliently for a feature that is not supported.  
Note that resilience can apply even when the ODF document is conformant but 
uses features that a given product release does not support.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Davies [mailto:[email protected]] 
< http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/msg11817.html>
Sent: Sunday, October 02, 2011 18:00
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [libreoffice-users] Re: OASIS Standard ODF 1.2 Approved

Hi :)
I think there are a couple of bug-reports for deviations from the 1.2 format 
but probably some of that has been fixed by now.  
Regards from
Tom :)


--- On Mon, 3/10/11, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote:
From: Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]>
< http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/msg11816.html>
Subject: RE: [libreoffice-users] Re: OASIS Standard ODF 1.2 Approved
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Date: Monday, 3 October, 2011, 1:52

Marc asks: How conformant is LibreOffice as a producer and consumer
of the OASIS ODF 1.2 Standard?

I don't know how to assess that.  I assume it is reasonably
conformant and that most documents that happen to be produced
are satisfactory to consumers that accept ODF 1.0/1.1 also.

[ ... ]


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