*/workben, what is that?

[bjoern]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 05:50:57PM +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> I was checking something and I came around a vcl/workben with a
> suspiciously looking makefile.mk (looks dmake to me), and after
> searching I found a few more workbens but nothing indicating what is it.
> 
> Any idea what is that, seems bit rot to me, do I need to worry about
> updating anything there?

These used to be "standalone apps/manual tests", just to play around with the
code specific of the module without a complete LibreOffice. As they are not
build in the default build, they were in bad shape even in old OOo times (and
newer have been moved to gbuild -- as they werent building before mostly.).

So indeed, they likely should be killed for the most part as bitrot. BUT there
is one exception I would make, which is the stuff you found first: vcl. We
might at some point create new backends for vcl (or chisel out vcl, making it a
wrapper around some other toolkit). For that, the examples in workben might be
helpful to bootstrap and test iteratively, without having to support ALL of
LibreOffice at once in the one huge step.

Best,

Bjoern