Subject: Re: back compatibility post 1.0
From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Mon Jan 14 2002 - 09:01:46 CST
On Sat, 2002-01-12 at 22:00, Alan Horkan wrote:
> its annoying to find that even though you have a copy of
> (a) Word (processor) some smartass has sent you a file produced
> in the latest version so you still cannot open it, there may even be a
> viewer/plugin but you cannot find it or cannot install it.
>
> Will people using Abiword 1.0 still be able to open documents sent to them
> by people using Abiword 1.2, at least display the text and then
> ignore/warn about the unsupported features?
>
> As a stable supported release people wont want to change from Abiword v1.0
> Upgrading or changing the software in anyway may not be practical, even if
> Abiword is free.
> So can anyone tell me how robust the Abiword importer really is?
>
> This should in no way be taken as criticism, im just ...
At the present time, I'm thinking that the AbiWord 1.2 file format will
be largely (if not completely) incompatible with the AbiWord 1.0 file
format. It's quite possible that AbiWord 1.2 will use the OpenOffice
file format as its standard.
I'm hoping to ship an AbiWord 1.0 import/export plugin with AbiWord 1.2,
for compatibility reasons. I'm also hoping to ship a reasonable
OpenOffice or AbiWord 1.2 format plugin for AbiWord 1.0 when the time
comes to aide in the transition.
It would be next to impossible to make the AbiWord importer robust
enough to support these forward-compatibility changes, but with the
ability to ship plugins, this doesn't become so much of a problem.
I'm mainly concerned with inter-operability. So long as we still have
RTF, ABW 1.0, DOC compatibilities, AbiWord 1.0 and 1.2 users will be
able to exchange documents reasonably well. Of course, there are
features that just can't be exchanged between versions, such as tables,
embedded objects, frames, ... But for the most part, I'm envisioning a
smoothe transition. And AbiWord 1.2 will cost exactly as much as 1.0
did, so the cost of upgrading is absolutely minimal. Of course there are
those who will be unwilling or unable to upgrade. I'm thinking that you
can't please all of the people all of the time.
If a user doesn't want to use the common exchange filters, upgrade to
Abi 1.2, or download a plugin to read the new format, he/she is SOL. We
can only bend over backwards so far to make people happy.
Dom
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