IP Clearance: Impact

The following list describes the impact on GUI level of removal and replacement of libraries as described on the IP_Clearance page. Its intended purpose is to keep track of lost or modified functionality.

Changes that may impact users:

Library

What is changing

User Impact

lp_solve

lp_solve was replaced by CoinMP



This functionality is invoked by the user in Calc via Tools->Solver.  It is used for solving linear programming problems, including integer programming.

CoinMP comes from the Coin-OR open source project, an open source project that involves operations research professionals and includes cutting edge algorithms.

According to one research paper CoinMP offers superior performance compared to lp_solve.  So the overall user impact from this change should be positive.

i18nregexp

i18nregexp was replaced by ICU Regular Expressions.

No major impact for users; regular expressions work as usual and are faster. The ICU regexp engine provides more features such as better unicode support, look-aheads, look-behinds, back-references, better word-boundaries, grapheme-boundaries, and so on. Some deprecated extended syntax supported in earlier versions may not be available.

MySQL Connector/C++

 

MySQL connector can only be built when the C++ connector is pre-installed on the system. It will not be part of the binary release.

SVG: librsvg, libcroco, libgsf, gdk-pixbuf, glib, gettext, pango

These libraries have been removed from the product.

Instead of using an external SVG rendering library, Apache OpenOffice 3.4 has a major new feature of native SVG support, giving high quality, scalable, standards-compliant rendering on screen, print and PDF export.

libwpd

The libwpd library was removed from the product.

The WordPerfect filter ("WordPerfect Document (.wpd)") is not available anymore unless the library is provided by the platform. It depended on version 0.8 of the library anyways so no replacement unless someone creates a filter extension that can be installed separately.

fonts (liberation)

These fonts have been removed from the distribution due to an incompatible license.

Metrically equivalent fonts from Google's ChromeOS have been included as replacements: Tinos, Arimo and Cousine. Moreover, users may independently install liberation fonts to their system, in accordance with their license.  so there is no further user impact.

libneon

The neon library was removed from the distribution due to an incompatible license.

The neon library was used to for all http based communication including WebDAV, so it was possible to insert an image via an http Url.

The Apache licensed libserf replaced libneon (118569).

berkeleydb

The berkeleydb library was replaced because it had an incompatible license.

The berkeleydb was only employed for managing extentions. Originally it was also used for indexing help content.

Managing a handful of extensions using a database was overkill anyways and so replacing it by a much more light-weight solution was easily possible (118569).

core, flute, flow-engine, libbase, libfonts, libformula, liblayout, libloader, librepository, libserializer, libxml

Libraries used by the Report Builder extension were removed due to an incompatible license.

Report Builder extension will not be available unless someone works on it as a third-party extension.

ooo_crystal_images-1.tar.gz
ooo_oxygen_images-2009-06-17

Crystal and Oxygen and Tango icons sets were removed.

These were used by XOrg as defaults in KDE and Gnome. The user can still choose other icon sets like galaxy.

Changes with impact for developers but not for users:

Library

What is changing

Developer Impact

glibc

glibc is being removed from the product

No impact for users as the code base does not use it. If needed, developers will have to bring their own portable getopt() function to parse command lines (APR has one).

dmake

dmake source code has been removed.

The configure script has to be told where to find the dmake source (URL, path).

epm

epm source code has been removed.

EPM is only used for building if at all. If needed the configure script has to be told where to find the epm source (URL, path) or to build just the archives.

cppunit

cppunit source code has been removed.

cppunit tests have never been part of binary packages, therefore there is no impact for users. Developers have to install it manually in order to use it during development.

Changes without any impact:

Library

What is changing

Remarks

dictionaries

The dictionaries have been removed from SVN.

Precompiled dictionary extensions can still be installed from the extension repository. When we figure out how to bundle them with the install set, there should be no visible impact for the user.

cups

The cups source code has been removed from the repository.

CUPS itself is still used on platforms were it is the printing standard and it is no longer provided on platforms were it is not standard, so there is no impact at all.

rhino

The rhino library has been updated to the current version 1.7R3 which eliminated the use of the conflicting swingEx library.

The newer library also provides many bug-fixes and features.

xpdf

The xpdf source code was removed.

No impact for final users, since this only affected an extension. PDF import can only be built when the poppler library is pre-installed on the system. It will not be part of the binary release.

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