[ros-dev] Microsoft Office files in the trunk

[Reuben Perelman]

Why use a binary format? Shouldn't you be using ascii formats in a 
subversion repository.

Mike Swanson wrote:

>In the branch of press-media, there are two documents currently. An MS
>Word and MS PowerPoint document.
>
>I'm calling for SVN committers for _no more_ MS Office documents. They
>are a proprietary format, of which not all the features are currently
>known. I recommend instead the use of OASIS OpenDocument. Not only
>does it save much space, but it also does not contain any secrets in
>which need to be reverse engineered to discover.
>
>Real life example:
>I opened the MS Word flyer into AbiWord, and saw strange boxes. I
>wondered what they could be, so I loaded very-large OpenOffice.org.
>They are images! Not only that, but the formatting was drastically
>different in OOo compared to AbiWord. However, in OOo, it did look a
>lot more jumbled than the image-less AbiWord interpretation. Without a
>copy of Microsoft Office, I am unable to determine how the documents
>really should look.
>I am able to open the PowerPoint file in OpenOffice.org too, but as
>it's the only presentation software I have, I can't tell to see if
>there's any other interpretation differences between free presentation
>programs (assuming they support PPT . . . )
>
>OpenDocument isn't just some crazy format that a couple of programs
>support, either. Two complete office suits which support it are
>OpenOffice.org and KOffice. Two examples of individual applications
>supporting it are AbiWord and Gnumeric. By far, these are not the only
>programs which support it, the number is in the dozens. It's an
>XML-based format (easy to implement), compressed with Info-ZIP's
>DEFLATE.
>Really, Microsoft is the only developer that refuses to use this open
>file format. They claim that "it doesn't support all the features of
>Office", but even that shouldn't stop them (weather it's true or not),
>after all, they use _far_ more limiting formats like plain text or
>CSV.
>
>Please, for the good of the project, use the free OpenDocument format.
>If not for the reason of being open or free, but simply for the fact
>that it ensures that everybody will be able to view such documents (no
>need to buy any pricey office suites here!).
>--
>Mike
>
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