On 09.08.2011 20:49, Armin Le Grand wrote: > 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).
And moreover, we are talking about a format that does not support a huge number of OOo feature, UniCode support being only one of them. BTW: the reservation that legal requirements can force people to keep documents in the old binary StarOffice format is a red herring. I have serious doubts that any organization with such requirements has ever used this format. Remember, it's *not* an OOo format, it's the format of the pre-OOo StarOffice application that was replaced by the UniCode supporting XML format before OOo got its first release. For those with concerns that there might be some documents in the old format that "suddenly" needs to be opened, perhaps a standalone converter tool from "binfilter" to ODF could be provided. Wait a moment, that tools already exists: all existing OOo version can be used that way. Regards, Mathias
