Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > If all files do have an original location (I thought you wanted to > allow more weird things like drag-n-drop of an image without file > name), then I am not sure why we need more than two check boxes in > document settings: > > [ ] embed external files > [ ] update embedded files from their external source
That would in fact be a global auto setting. I would even ditch this second one. > Is there a real _need_ for being able to tweak this file by file? > Simple is often more powerful, IMO. I agree. This auto stuff is far too complicated to understand (both for users and developers) and only makes your life as developer difficult. I would make a clear separation between embedded and external files: Either a file is embedded or not. If it is embedded then the external counterpart is ignored. Only in the very moment when you deembed it the external file is checked, and if it exists you are asked for overwrite confirmation. Trying to synchronize embedded and external files needs a lot of code, and is difficult to understand by the user. Of course you can have all sorts of fancy dialogs: embed/deembed all files with one click, or only all graphics, or all files of a certain format, or whatever, but they don't need to store any status in the document. Explicitly embedding or deembedding a file is an easy operaton that the user will understand immediately. The auto status is not. I would also ditch the manifest file: You can build the list of embedded files from the zip contents. If you have a manifest file you only create additional problems: What are you going to do with files that are in the zip but not in the manifest? What are you going to do with files that are in the manifest and not in the zip? The manifest file is only a possibility to create invalid archives. The fact that OOo has this does not make it better. And finally please keep those people in mind who use version control systems. If you don't create a text-only version of the archive format then wembedding and VCS do not make much sense together. This is something that already annoyed me a lot with OOo (it has a flat XML format, but it is not possible to make this the default for all save operations). Georg
