Re: Excel BIFF plugin

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 06:08:02PM +0000, Nick Lamb wrote:
> I have built an experimental Excel 2.1, 3.0, 4.0 BIFF plugin. Right now
>
> There is an alternative. The similarity of Excel 2.1 BIFF with Excel 2000
> BIFF is eerie, they're quite closely related in fact. It might be possible
> to re-use ALL the modern BIFF support with the old files. However this
> would require re-architecting the existing Excel plug-in and in places
> where the OLE and pre-OLE worlds differ violently there would be a lot of
> potential to break old files when "improving" the Excel plug-in.

Given XL's lack of consistency when bumping record version numbers
I agree that the most prudent approach will be to keep the pre 5.0
importer distinct from the primary.  Destabilizing it to add support
for ancient files seems to offer more pain than promise.
 
> I might lose interest in this work as more pressing concerns arrive again
> but I promise to put whatever gets done up on the web and mail this list
> the URL before I put down my tools. Even the skeleton which already exists
> could be a life saver for getting old data into Gnumeric.

Lets get it into CVS post 1.0.  I'll advocate keeping the routines
in the same plugin as the main XL, but using a distinct set of
loader hooks.

Thanks
    Jody