Re: Relevance of PPT export filter

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 22, 2019 at 3:24 PM Ilmari Lauhakangas <
ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org> wrote:

> In https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89853#c18 Regina
> has a good point:
>
> "do we really want to work on _export_ filters for an old binary file
> format? We have already dropped export to the binary StarDivision
> formats (.sdd) and to the XML-formats of OpenOffice.org1.0 (.sxi)."
AFAIK the reason StarDivision binary formats were dropped because the
implementation was tightly coupled with the core and was a maintenance
burden. The idea was to re-implement the filters properly if it will be
necessary (it wasn't).
The OpenOffice.org1.0 export was dropped because ODF filter is actually as
good or better.
So for PPT I'm actually not convinced that OOXML PPTX filter is in such a
good state that we can declare it unsupported (for export). I really don't
want to see that people that previously used PPT then saved as PPTX and
would had some regressions because something in OOXML isn't as good or
different as in PPT filter.
Continuing working on PPT export is another thing however, I wouldn't
bother too much about the PPT export but I would make sure the same
functionality in OOXML works correctly. We need to come up with a strategy
how to convince people to convert from old binmary MS formats to OOXML or
ODF.

In concrete terms, should we declare bug bankruptcy on PPT export issues
> and move any new reports to WONTFIX from now on?

No. I would reclassify them in some way that a check (in form of a
roundtrip test) in OOXML filter for the same bug is necessary.


> Ilmari


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