Re: Remove ActiveX from LibreOffice

Why are you removing ActiveX from LibreOffice? Excel supports it, and it is desirable for integration with Windows apps like C#, Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro. It allows those other apps to integrate the app directly into their app.

I have tried to use it previously, but could not find documentation for it. If it's an unused feature, I'd suggest that's why than for other reasons.

Best regards,
Rick C. Hodgin


-------- Original Message --------
From: Chris Sherlock
Sent: Mon, 11/01/2016 08:21 PM
To: Ashod Nakashian
CC: libreoffice ; Bryan Quigley
Subject: Re: Remove ActiveX from LibreOffice

That sounds pretty reasonable to me. 

Out of interest, just how “integrated” is this with the code? If someone wanted to create an external project on GitHub or some place like this, would it be feasible?

I guess I’m trying to understand how much of core it touches… to reimplement an ActiveX control outside of the main tree, would a developer need to fork LibreOffice entirely, or could they maintain their codebranch entirely seperately and update the control if necessary after we do our changes to the main codebase?

I’m definitely for removing all vestiges of ActiveX from LO, but the more I think about it the more I can see that some corporation somewhere might be affected, far more so than the remove of NPAPI… giving them the option of a control that can be maintained outside of the main project would be nice :-)

Chris

On 12 Jan 2016, at 9:37 AM, Ashod Nakashian <ashnakash@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 2:32 PM, Bryan Quigley <gquigs@gmail.com> wrote:

Anywhere else we should post this?

Ideally the note would show up unintrusively upon loading/using the ActiveX itself. Unfortunately we can't show a message box or some such UI, in case the ActiveX is used non-interactively (in which case it'd block forever, becoming unusable).

So the next best thing to do is include the note in the installation, which should be hard to miss if made prominent (unless automated in silent mode).

This would get the attention of possibly the users, if not the developers (who might not even test out new versions as they come out, and expect things to work as before). Users can contact developers, I expect, or at least plan accordingly. Regardless, all we want is to give advance warning before the day someone installs a newer version and be met with the surprise of missing ActiveX altogether.

The installation and release notes seem to be the most reasonable places, if not upon using the ActiveX itself. Unless others have better ideas.