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.
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.
Forgot one point: We are not talking about stopping support for
something like PDF/A where readability is guaranteed for years/decades.
We are talking about wildly, unplanned grown old binary filter formats
in the old days of the office where the model was simply streamed out
and in, patched and repaired many times, never documented (for good reason).
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
--
ALG
