IRC discussion on i18n, xml/utf8, and 1.8->2.0 data migration issues

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Dan Widyono <dan at widyono.net>:

>> The user should be allowed to make an informed choice between losing
>> certain incompatible data and accessing their data with their older
>> software.
>
> I propose this freedom be granted in the new version of GC (2.0) upon Saving
> As... (using GC1.8 file format) as opposed to adding logic in 1.8.

Well, changing 1.8 is not an option..

> Other than that, I agree with giving the user an informed choice.

While in principle I agree with this, users (in general) are dumb and have
no idea how to do that.  Many times they have no idea what the choice means,
and other times they will just use the default.  However we can certainly
do something similar to what OOo does, let the user choose an output
format, and pop up a dialog if we think that output format will cause
data loss.

The downside of this approach is that it takes up most more code, because you
need multiple format output generators, a way to specify the output format
during output generation, and some way to determine a priori if the chosen
output format cannot encode the actual data.

I'll also point out that once we move to SQLite this issue becomes much
more important, because the schema version is part of the upgrade, so
if we want sqlite compatibility across versions we really need to handle
this "save as <version>" correctly.

> Dan W.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available