Re: [Libreoffice] minor idl fixes

Hi Thomas,

On Sat, 2011-12-10 at 14:57 +0100, Tomas Hlavaty wrote:
> I would be happy with LGPLv3+ but I haven't found much on why was MPL
> added and/or preffered for new contributions.  Could you please point me
> to some discussions so I can make up my mind on this matter?

        Sure; so - the MPL is primarily there to make LibreOffice more friendly
to companies, such as IBM, who have an aversion to the LGPLv3 - and with
whom we hope to eventually reconcile into one big happy, copy-left
family again. It is a rather weaker copy-left license, and doesn't seem
to have done much harm to Firefox ;-) Making your code available under
it has been a criteria for including code into LibreOffice from our
launch. As you say, prolly we should have a write-up on that somewhere.
Having a just a few patches under a different license is rather a
problem - as/when the ASF manage to get OO.o under the AL2 license,
we'll do a big license/header change across the whole codebase, and then
(hopefully) stop having to ask everyone for this.

> There seems to be agreement that the RDB type database should go away.
> There are several LO projects that would be affected by this and they
> seem rather complex with dependencies.

        Oooh - it'd be great to have some work on that :-)

> As a proof of concept, I have created a unoidl2 project:
>    git clone http://logand.com/git/unoidl2.git
...
> This would allow us to get rid of the RDB files (although I need to
> familiarise myself with current use-cases to understand the impact of
> such change, e.g. merging in custom plugins).

        So, there are rather a number of hidden criteria for RDB files: that
they are tiny, instant to parse (and/or don't require parsing) - since
we get to do this quite a lot at startup (which is already not as
performant as it could be ;-). The data needs to be in a small (read
three or less) number of files - to avoid I/O seek latency on rotating
media.

> The other affected LO projects would likely be:

        Well  all of these other guys -should- work on top of the
typedescription API (I would hope), so as long as that is in-place, life
will be good I think.

> It might be interesting to generate vapi file for vala programming
> language, for example.  Are there any examples of connection to
> libreoffice from plain C?

        Sadly, the plain-C UNO bridge died a death some years back I think;
though this was originally intended to be possible [ the base sal/
library still has a C ABI/API ].

        HTH,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot