Bug 33135

I'm taking the liberty of marking this an enhancement.  I hope this isn't a problem.  FYI, the release notes say:

"Filters for the legacy StarOffice binary formats may be missing."

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/release-notes/

Nope, this is a bug report, not a request for an enhancement. The lack of binary StarOffice formats is not intentional, but a honest mistake in building.

Well that's good to know, because I was starting to get a little bit worried for a moment. I used StarOffice from versions 3 through to 5.1. If I now find that I can no longer open any of my old documents without even the possibility to convert them into the newer format then I will be parting company with LibO and sticking with OOo 3.2.1 :-))

Hmm; this was a deliberate choice to reduce the size of the windows installer for the vast majority of our users. It saves 21Mb on disk, and 7.5Mb on the size of the downloaded package - already 209Mb; it is also used by virtually no-one - particularly globally.

We still build it for Linux, and Mac (I suspect), since we package lang-packs separately there (those systems have 'real' package management).

So - what do we do ? we can enable it - but it will make our installer rather larger- 217Mb instead of 209. Or we could perhaps split it out into its own install for 3.3.1.

Hopefully you can see it is not an open & shut case :-)

Since it is last-minute, consulted Sophie (in a low B/W country), and she was happy to include it for 3.3.0 - but would like it split out later. Though, perhaps we can reduce the bloat to an acceptable level by removing export support in future [ I assume no-one is pushing for -saving- into these formats ;-]. That work is underway on master.

Fridrich - can we add --enable-binfilter to windows ?

Added and will be in 3.3.0

Hi Michael, all,

(In reply to comment #5)
> Since it is last-minute, consulted Sophie (in a low B/W country), and she was
> happy to include it for 3.3.0 - but would like it split out later. Though,
> perhaps we can reduce the bloat to an acceptable level by removing export
> support in future [ I assume no-one is pushing for -saving- into these formats
> ;-]. That work is underway on master.
> 
> Fridrich - can we add --enable-binfilter to windows ?

is this standalone version already available somewhere? Or is this functionality still within LibO 3.3.1? 

I ask because there was a question on the user list, where someone couldn't open a Word 97 file. (Ok, it was a .dot file, template but still...)

Would be good, if this functionality could be build in via an extension for those people who need it. 

Sigrid