Suggestion: depend on writerperfect directly for wordperfect/visio/works import filter

[Sven Langkamp]

On 11/22/11, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
> On Saturday 19 November 2011 Nov, Thorsten Zachmann wrote:
>> On Saturday, November 19, 2011 02:26:12 Yue Liu wrote:
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > Recently when working on visio import filter I found I'm basically
>> > copy codes from writerperfect. Then I investigated wpd import filter
>> > in words and found it used codes from a old version of writerperfect,
>> > wpg import filter in karbon used a convenience method from libwpg to
>> > convert to svg but some apps don't support svg well. If I implement
>> > vsd2odg and wpg2odg I have to copy codes again from writerperfect.
>> >
>> > So I think why not depend on writerperfect directly? It will save a
>> > lot of maintenance effort, and if we want to do any improvement we can
>> > go upstream directly. Writerperfect is maintained by the authors of
>> > libwpd,libwps,libvisio,libwpg, and many distros already have
>> > package(libvisio has no stable release yet so we need to depend on git
>> > version currectly, i've made PKGBUILDs for Arch).
>>
>> I think it makes much more sense to only use libvisio directly and write
>> out
>> the stuff in our filter instead of using the binary provided by
>> writerperfect.
>> It will reduce the dependencies and might also be faster. I talked to
>> Friedrich at the ODF plugfest the last to days and he showed me how easy
>> it is
>> to use.
>
> hm... What is writerperfect actually? If it isn't too big & saves us a lot
> of code, especially code that's copied from it, it might be worth it.

writerperfect provides executables that do what our filters are doing.
The difference is minimal, in one case you call the library directly
and in the other case you call a seperate executable. As you can see
in the wpg filter, the amount of code isn't big.

Currently there are three converters, each with a size of 50-100kb on ubuntu.