LibreOffice extensions to ODF: Improving documentation

[Robinson Tryon]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Terrence Enger <tenger at iseries-guru.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-11-27 at 09:07 -0500, Robinson Tryon wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 11:06 AM, Michael Stahl <mstahl at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > and if you select to store your files in a specific,
>> > non-extended version in Tools->Options you don't (or at least shouldn't)
>> > get any extensions...
>>
>> I totally agree :-)  My reasoning was that once ODF 1.3 comes out, ODF
>> 1.2 Extended might still be a user-selectable option. But perhaps that
>> won't be the case?
>
> Is there a cost to keeping 1.2 Extended?  I can imagine it might be
> useful for people sharing documents with users of an older, pre-1.3,
> LibreOffice.

...or other tools that don't yet support ODF 1.3. I assume that
AbiWord, Calligra, AOO, and MS-Office will all eventually aim to
support ODF 1.3, but I can imagine that LibreOffice might be one of
the first adopters.

Question: After the official release of ODF 1.2, how long did it take
for tools (including LibreOffice) to add support? Do we think it's
likely for MS to provide an ODF 1.3 patch for older MS-Office
releases?

>From a practical perspective, supporting ODF 1.2 Extended would
require the continued maintenance of LibreOffice extensions to ODF 1.2
that have been incorporated into (or had a functional equivalent
provided by) ODF 1.3. As it stands, that seems like a very minor
amount of work.

Here's why:
We've got only two listed extensions that have notes about being
incorporated into ODF:

1) https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/ODF_Implementer_Notes#Store_more_excel_user_form_attributes
Support for this apparently already exists in ODF 1.1, and it looks
like we're implementing it for LO 4.4. It should be ODF 1.1 valid, and
thus backwards-compatible, so no need for ODF 1.2 Extended.

2) https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/ODF_Implementer_Notes#Support_notes_for_Impress

Based on my reading of the ticket, it looks like this extension is
going to make it into ODF 1.3.

Of the 20 other (documented) LO extensions to ODF, 5 don't appear to
have an upstream OASIS ticket. (Question: Is there a reason not to
push all of our extensions upstream?)

Of the remaining 15,
  Fix Version: ODF 1.3 - Unresolved  ---> 11
  Fix Version: none - Unresolved -> 2
  Fix Version: ODF 1.2 - Fixed w/patch

These last two share the same OASIS ticket. Can we mark these as
standardized in ODF? Do current builds of ODF implement the updated
spec? (i.e. are they no longer dependent on the extension?)
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/ODF_Implementer_Notes#Support_surface_chart_extension_on_import
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/ODF_Implementer_Notes#New_chart_types_filled_net_and_filled_radar

So to sum up from above, the cost of supporting ODF 1.2 Extended is
(at present) just the cost of supporting a single ODF extension.


Cheers,
--R

-- 
Robinson Tryon
QA Engineer - The Document Foundation
LibreOffice Community Outreach Herald
qubit at libreoffice.org