Is there any effort or discussion yet about collaborative use of libreoffice applications?

[Gerry T.]

Hi Michael,

in the medium/long run, the *ODFDOM changes* approach might be quite
promising for both LibreOffice desktop and Libre/CollaboraOffice Online.
Probably still enormous effort in the LibreOffice core, but it seems to
be a future-proof concept. The concept that Svante has been working on
aims at exchanging changes and is cross-application, ultimately a part
of the ODF standard. This seems to put the level of collaborative
editing much higher. It would be great if LibreOffice is one of the
pilot apps for the approach.

The description of the concept and code is here:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133984#c8 and
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133984

Here two presentations on the approach:

*
https://libocon.org/assets/Conference/Almeria/Svante-Interoperable-Office-CollaborationwithNotes.pdf
Presentation 2019 on Interoperable Office Collaboration (Svante Schubert)
*
https://github.com/svanteschubert/odftoolkit/raw/odf-changes/LibOCon2018%20%20-%20Interoperable%20Office%20Collaboration.pdf
Presentation 2018 on Interoperable Office Collaboration by Svante
Schubert (more detailed than 2019 presentation)

Best, Gerry


Am 15.12.20 um 18:09 schrieb Michael Meeks:
> Hi Marc,
>
> 	A few thoughts on this thread:
>
> On 15/12/2020 11:36, Marc Roos wrote:
>>> What I was getting at was a way to make a fat client collaborative. 
>> Calc has a share option now not ?
> 	This is a development mailing list; it is great to ask questions around
> the code. There are two approaches to Collaboration as you've seen the
> COOL approach (poke in #cool-dev on IRC), and the Telepathy approach
> that Caolan kindly pointed to below inside LibreOffice.
>
>> Where multiple users should be able to 
>> edit the same version. I think that is nice, I prefer to have such a 
>> thing more for write, but it is a nice start. I think it is not 100% ok, 
>> because I did not get any updated changes of others, or I am not using 
>> it correctly.
> 	The telepathy prototype is no longer included - but the patch Caolan
> pointed at has an attempt to pull out a set of 'operations' that might
> work for spreadsheets, and could be built on. I expect some of the core
> re-factoring to make this easier is still present.
>
> 	This mailing list is a great for developers to discuss resurrecting and
> extending that - it's a generally useful feature - although it is really
> far from trivial to implement, even with the synchronous event model
> that was imagined and integral to the Telepathy attempt.
>
> 	Personally I'd recommend trying instead to make LOK more deterministic,
> and doing this at the LOK user / input event layer: but even that is
> rather tricky - consider a sort of some data via a column populated with
> =RAND() as a banal example - and needing to synchronize that across
> multiple users.
>
> 	Anyhow - I'm happy to help with any code suggestions / reviews as/when
> you have a core build and are ready to go there. I would recommend reading:
>
> https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2013-10-09-collaboration.pdf
>
> 	first for some more background. We chose to go a different route with
> Collabora Online - which should be much easier - but like anything
> complex in practice is really hard to get right too =)
>
> 	HTH,
>
> 		Michael.
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Caolán McNamara [mailto:caolanm at redhat.com] 
>> Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2020 9:41 PM
>> To: Stu
>> Cc: libreoffice
>> Subject: Re: Is there any effort or discussion yet about collaborative 
>> use of libreoffice applications?
>>
>> On Sun, 2020-12-13 at 07:56 -0500, Stu wrote:
>>> What I was getting at was a way to make a fat client collaborative.
>> For a while we have an experimental --enable-telepathy option, so 
>> searching for "telepathy libreoffice" will throw up some old attempts 
>> similar to that. e.g.
>> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62722 but eventually 
>> effort in that direction was dropped with 
>> https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=b7b159d79c2b4ec53915e0b9c3e28912c289a5ba