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Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 01:07:53 +0200
To: poi-dev@jakarta.apache.org
From: Rainer Schwarze <rsc@admadic.de>
Subject: Re: HWPF-Development
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At 12:18 26.09.2006, Nick Burch wrote:
>It's all a question of developers with the know-how being willing to spend 
>the time on the code. We only had the one guy (Ryan) doing HWPF work, so 
>with him gone there's no-one to contribute new code, but also no-one to 
>mentor new HWPF coders.

(I sent my reply to poi-dev, because I had the impression, that its
now not much of a poi-user thing now. Please correct me if it should
not be that way.)

Indeed :-) Climbing into sources from someone else is complicated
enough - adding this "Horrible-*-Format" stuff can easily give the rest...

>Great, we'd love to have you on board. If you have patches, just post them 
>to bugzilla, and maybe drop a note to poi-dev explaining it. Ideally, 
>submit patches with test cases, so we can be sure that future changes 
>don't break your code.

I already wondered a bit how a good automated test case could be done
when dealing with Word files (surely applies to Excel, Powerpoint
too). Reading something from a file is probably easily checked. But
writing it properly surely needs a human who's checking whether Word
crashes or not.
Are there already some solutions to automatically test "file writes"
for correctness in the H??F-projects?

>If you have coding queries, give us a shout on poi-dev. If you have word 
>format queries, it's often worth trying asking the other open source 
>projects. The koffice powerpoint guy gave me some useful insight into how 
>everything fitted together when I was starting on hslf.

Thanks for the hint. I already could remove potential reasons for my
problems by comparing output files of OpenOffice, AbiWord etc.
Unfortunately I'm still not able to reliably make sure that Word does
not crash using HWPF-generated files. In any case I'll go around and
ask some questions :-)

best wishes, Rainer


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