[libreoffice] allow passing FilterOptions via cli

[Tomas Hlavaty]

Hi Stephan,

thank you for your reply.

I am asking because:

- The commit fixes two bugs:
  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47892
  and https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36313

- The commit enables previously broken functionality
  in a very simple way.  The user interface could be more
  user friendly as you pointed out.  However, it is not clear
  how the user interface should be improved.  Also, anything
  more sophisticated would likely be significantly more
  complex change I think.  The commit finds a good balance
  with its simplicity & impact.

- At the moment, it is not possible to use LibreOffice command line
  to convert to and from text formats, because the FilterOptions
  is not available.  If users need to convert documents to and from
  text formats, they need to go via UNO.  However, there are
  problems when using UNO:

  - There is no way to guarantee that a UNO connection releases
     allocated memory.  Combined with memory leaks
     in LibreOffice, this makes it rather inconvenient when using
     it in a long running process.

  - UNO evolves, forcing us to follow the changes to
    the protocol.  We can't simply use whatever the official
    LibreOffice for a given system is, we have to use a particular
    version.  On Linux, we use v3.5.

  - On Windows, we still use OpenOffice, because UNO
    on LibreOffice does not properly close files, which combined
    with the mandatory locking mis-feature on Windows is fatal.

- My prefered solution to our LibreOffice issues would be to
  to replace our dependency on UNO with simple command
  invocation.  This should solve our problems at the cost
  of slower conversions due to slow LibreOffice startup.
  That trade-off is reasonable I think.  There seems to be also
  general intention to improve LibreOffice startup in the future.

- The fix will be released in about half a year so I have to either:
 
  - wait and stick to the old LibreOffice and OpenOffice
    for half a year;

  - build custom LibreOffice myself with the cherry-picked patch
    which is doable on Linux, but rather complex on Windows;

  - ask for the fix to be put into v4.3 already; it is a bugfix
    release after all

It would definitely help us to have the bugfix earlier then in v4.4.
It might also help the people who reported those bugs and it also
might help people, who might want to use FilterOptions but silently
give up when they find it broken.

Thank you very much!

Tomas

On 09/09/14 10:20, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> On 09/08/2014 05:13 PM, Tomas Hlavaty wrote:
>> Sorry, I meant 4.3.3 as 4.3.2 is in freeze already.
>>
>> On 08/09/14 17:10, Tomas Hlavaty wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> would it be possible to cherry-pick
>>> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=45ba4d79d968f81f74ef0c4588fd15b1ce91153f
>>>
>>> to the 4.3.2 release?  It is currently commited towards 4.4 (scheduled
>>> for 2/2015) but as this is an old bug and 4.3.2 is called bugfix
>>> release, I wonder if it was be acceptable?
>
> Given "That is, I am not sure whether the fix from comment 16 is
> already a practical-enough solution?" at
> <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36313#c17>, I'm not sure
> whether it would actually help anybody to backport that to 4.3.3.
>
> Are you asking because you know about a specific scenario in which it
> would help, or just on generic "it's a bugfix, so it should go into a
> bugfix release" grounds?
>
> Stephan
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