How far can the LO file's contents be stretched?

[Michael Meeks]

On Sun, 2012-02-05 at 21:50 +0100, Johannes Sixt wrote:
> The native file format of LO files is simply a ZIP archive with various
> types of files in it.

	Right - although, there is another variant of our native file format
that is almost as efficient to read/write and that is Flat ODF - try
saving as '.fodt' eg.

> I intend to do some gymnastics with the ZIP files and the XML in them,
> and I would like to know how far it can be stretched ;) In particular, I
> want to explode the archive into git tree, mangle its contents in
> various ways, and then generate an ODF file from the tree using git-archive.

	So - unless you're in love with zipping things, you can use flat odf,
which prolly diffs, and compresses more pleasantly inside git. We're
most interested in people helping improve the stability (and similiarity
of that eg. for automatic styles) during write too.

> 2) Another side effect of the detour via git will be that empty folders
> will be absent in the package resulting from git-archive:

	It would really be rather nice if we didn't create empty directories
there in the first instance ;-)

> in the result. Again, is it a problem?

	It shouldn't be; if it is - we should fix it - patches most welcome.

> 3) Can the styles listed in an <office:automatic-styles> section be
> renamed? For example:

	I believe the names are arbitrary and can be replaced without problems;
of course - do you want to get a well defined order here based on some
hash of the attributes or somesuch ? if so, patches most welcome :-)

	Looking forward to seeing what you're up to :-)

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot