Re: the future of OpenDocument in Abiword?

Hi Sander,

On 8/3/06, Sander van Loon <svloon@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> I have brought this up before, and the answer was that because
> OpenDocument didn't play nice with Abiword's internals (or something
> like that, dunno what it was exactly anymore?) it was decided against
> using it as the default format.
>
> But will it remain like this in the future? We all think sane defaults
> are important, don't we? Yet still the abw format is the default, which
> is solely used by Abiword while OpenDocument is gaining more and more
> popularity.
>
> In the release notes of Abiword 2.4.5 it is mentioned that a massive
> amount of bugs in the OpenDocument import and export filters were fixed.
> When will the OpenDocument import and export filters have matured enough
> to justify using OpenDocument as the default format?

While there have been a lot of improvements lately, given our level of
support for the format, I believe that there is still the possibility
of dataloss when using OpenDocument. Sum1 or DanD would be able to
address that better than I could.

Such a change would not happen during a stable series, such as 2.4.x.
And such a change could not happen until OpenDocument support were
moved from being a plugin and into the core abiword package. This
could possibly happen by the 2.6.0 release.

However, if one wanted to get nit-picky about sane defaults and file
formats with wide deployment, lots of implementations, and lots of
"popularity", I'd rather talk about making RTF the default file format
instead.

Best,
Dom

-- 
Counting bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums.