proposal for collaboration between Gnumeric and LibreOffice

[Markus Mohrhard <markus mohrhard googlemail com>]

Hey,

I'm one of the LibreOffice Calc maintainers and one of the people maintaining the calc automated tests.

As you might know there is no official OpenFormula test suite which in my opinion is one of the big issues with OpenFormula. To make matters worse many corner cases are not specified and therefore implementation defined resulting in problems around interoperability.

Another point is that adding new features requires to add them into an own namespace which is important for Excel interoperability. As more or less every implementation is implementing its own names for these non-specified functions it further causes interoperability issues.

I was wondering if there is interested in tackling these issues as part of a cooperation between the two projects by creating a test suite for OpenFormula functions and related functions. The idea would be that this suite could be consumed by both projects in their automated tests to make sure that the implementation is consistent and that names for new functions are the same for both projects.

Currently my idea would be to use flat odf for a document containing a spreadsheet with the functions and csv for the expected results but I'm open to other ideas that create easy to consume tests.

I'd love to hear what you think of this proposal for collaboration.

Regards,

Markus