Bug 85660

Summary:	FILESAVE: Improve source control compatibility of flat ODF files
Product:	LibreOffice	Reporter:	Nathan Myers <ncm>
Component:	filters and storage	Assignee:	Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	low	CC:	fdbugs
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Nathan Myers 2014-10-30 20:16:20 UTC

I was very happy to find that LO supported a textual file format, because it made LO documents compatible with git, and I could diff document versions.

When I actually tried putting fodt documents into git, I found that the diffs are practically useless because numerous arbitrary numeric identifiers are arbitrarily changed from one save to the next.  I don't think this is a fault of the file format.  Rather, it appears that LO randomly re-assigns the numbers for no outwardly visible reason.

This is a request to preserve "rsid" numbers and text:style-name assignments in fodt files across loads and saves in cases where there is no objectively sound reason not to. 

It would help, too, to limit line lengths to some smallish multiple of 100 bytes where possible, broken preferentially at XML lexeme boundaries.

Comment 1 Matthew Francis 2014-10-31 10:59:37 UTC

At some risk of disabling other potentially useful ODF extensions, you can disable the rsid feature by setting
Tools - Options - Load/Save - ODF format version
to "1.2" rather than the default of "1.2 extended (recommended)"


Pretty-printing the XML of FODT files (a la "xmllint --format") on save could potentially be a useful "Expert Configuration" flag

Setting:
-> NEW
-> Importance: low, enhancement
-> Component: filters and storage
-> Updated title

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