[Libreoffice] binfilter, filter & co: some questions

[Caolán McNamara]

On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 20:25 +0100, Pierre-André Jacquod wrote:
> A lot of theses "if" are typically like:
>     else if (aFltName.EqualsAscii(pFilterLotus))
>     {
>          DBG_BF_ASSERT(0, "STRIP");
>     }
> 
> binfilter should only contain filter for StarOffice format, isn't it?

It may contain support for some other odd old filter too, e.g. maybe the
word4word filter is in there, not sure.

> All these Excel, HTML and other checks are rest of the time this filter
> was the main one and could be also cleaned?

*probably*, maybe.

> A bit more generally, (for my overall understanding)
> what is the goal / mean of the filter repository ? What is the logic
> behind the
> > filters/filter/source/msfilter (or others)

specifically for "msfilter" it contains shared code used by all the
binary msoffice filters, basically the core ms drawing "escher" stuff.

> in comparison to directories (e.g)
> > calc/sc/source/filter/
> > sw/source/filter/

> Or is the decision taken to split the filter to each
> application/repository (calc, writer,..)

It just grew this way, each apps original set of filters were developed
by that app, stuck into their local filters dir and typically know a lot
about the internals of their apps and are tightly bound to them. Some
shared stuff bounced around the place, e.g. svx, sfx2, before settling
in "filters". Newly written from scratch filters often were less tightly
bound to their apps, albeit a million times slower with stuffing things
through the xml file format, and could go into filters as well.

C.