Subject: Re: 0.9.3 blocker? -- Re: style => name?
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Sep 09 2001 - 17:06:44 CDT
On Sun, 9 Sep 2001, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Paul Rohr wrote:
>
> > Ick. It just occured to me that this file format change for style
> > references (from STYLE to NAME) sounds like a showstopper for 0.9.3.
> >
> > I don't know when the original change was made, but if it came after 0.9.2,
> > then I'd *strongly* recommend that 0.9.3 be held until this gets resolved.
> >
> > Prior to the change, there was no compatibility code required, and if we
> > revert to the original design, then none will be required either -- so long
> > as we don't do an "official" binary release with the NAME= variant to the
> > file format.
> >
> > In the future, we need to be a *lot* more explicit about any file format
> > changes which might break compatibility.
>
> Paul, it is too late. We already have documents in the wild with a mixture
> of "name" and "style". This might be an ancient feature of abiword or it
> may have come about at version 0.90. Doing this change now limits the
> number of mixed "name" and "style" documents.
>
> However this code is buggy as has been found by Randy and
> (already) partially fixed by Tomas. There is case to made for waiting till
> all this has shaken out. I think I number strange effects I wasn't sure
> about may be fixed by completong this "style" => transition.
>
> So to repeat again for everyone.
>
> At version 0.90 at least we have documents with a mixture of "name" and
> "style" in a our file formats. Look at some documents if you don't believe
> me.
>
OK. I'm now no longer sure about this statement. I haven't been able to
generate a mixed "name" and "style" in the body of the *.abw file. I'd
still like to do the change to a single name for the style name. Either
"name" or "style". To replace "style" => to "name" and remove the
compatibility code will require about 10 LOC in ie_imp_AbiWord_1 to strip
out "style" and replace it with "name" on import. This will mean an extra
parse of every XML string in the file to search for "style" which really
sucks.
An alternative is to replace "name" with "style". Then I'd just need to
strip out "name" in the style header definition. This would not suck as
much.
I dunno the right thing to do. I'm considerabally more confident of
getting all the style code to work right with just a single character
string, "style" or "name".
Apart from this style thing 0.9.3 is a nice release.
Sorry and frustrated.
Martin
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