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

[Johannes Sixt]

Am 06.02.2012 23:32, schrieb Michael Stahl:
> i think merge document is probably based on compare documents, and last
> i looked at that in Writer it was so horribly broken it would need years
> to fix (being based on Writer's horrible redlining is just the start...).

Oh no! I'd like to have something workable by March. ;)

>> Now I'm exploring plan B: textual merging of the XML data. For this, I'm
>> exploding the zip archive into a git tree so that I can use the git
>> toolbox. Unfortunately, there are many textual conflicts because the
>> automatic styles are numbered, and as styles come and go between
>> document versions, many unnecessary conflicts arise at the point where
>> the styles are used. To work it around, I would rename the styles based
>> on a hash of the style definition and sort them (to be able to better
>> merge the <automatic-styles> section).
> 
> fixing that would perhaps be a good idea; code is somewhere in the
> "xmloff" module...

I'll probably have a look at that.

> flat ODF filters don't support all features of package-based ODF (which
> is i guess the reason why OOo never shipped a flat ODF filter out of the
> box); also your images and embedded objects will blow up considerably in
> size due to base64 encoding.

File size is not a problem, but the lack of features is. Any tip where I
can start searching?

-- Hannes