Re: BIFF loader source

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Jody,

On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 08:22, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> Actually, Nick discussed it before redoing things this way and I'd
> rather it stay distinct.  The XL plugin is critical enough that
> destabilizing it with an infrequent code path seems a bad bet.

        Agreed; but just do a diff on biff-formula.c vs. ms-formula-read.c and
you come across a handful of places where it is substantially different
- like a few lines of trivially auditable change. Some of the changes
are of the form:

+                       ptg_length = 6;
-                       ptg_length = (ver >= MS_BIFF_V8) ? 8 : 6;

        Which were already working for older biff versions [ this is not a
criticism Nick - I can see why you wanted to clean it up for your code
path ].

> Utility routines should be shared as much as possible, but
> individual record parsers for the older records are generally fairly
> different so there is no major gain.

        Given that there are 1450 lines of relatively complex formula parsing /
converting code that are then modified by 20 lines of changes -
including large cut and paste tables etc. it doesn't seem like there is
much sharing proposed.

        Clearly - cut and paste of large chunks of (complex) code is barbaric,
and worse when the code is complex (fragile?) than otherwise. I would
strongly recommend then that these (great) changes are merged back into
the mainline - so the work isn't wasted - during the Gnome 2.0 port,
where (presumably) it is ok to touch the importer. But that it remains a
standalone, extra for 1.0 - in which case cut & paste is perhaps
justified.

        How does that sound ?

        Regards,

                Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot