Re:Restructuring a giant, ancient codebase to make LibreOffi...
by chris_wot on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:27AM
(#16203850)
Actually, maybe not for Windows 3.1 (it did run in this) but there was a shim layer where the developers inplemebted something called uwinapi. Thus implemented NT functions for Windows 95 and 98, and in fact it was used layer for a few functions that didn’t work in Windows XP but did in Vista.
There is a whole bunch of code in the SAL that works for OS/2 but it has maintenance overhead. Both uwinapi and the OS/2 port have been removed from Libreoffice.
As for a code dump before 2000 - man, I would love that. But sadly, it doesn’t exist. The Star/Sun/Oracle guys chanted VCSes a few times. They had a procedure for merging patches into the trunk that was insane - and we have lost the history of those branches so from between 2001 to 2009 the code becomes harder to follow.
Unfortunately, there are decisions that were made before 2000 but that’s lost to us now due to a lack of version history from before this point.
1. I've been wondering this for a while but never knew who/where to ask, but where's the original StarOffice code dump? What actually got dumped? I'm fascinated by that whole transition timeline, both in terms of its own history and also as one of many code dump events. (One of these days I'll go learn about Mozilla.)
2. Are there any interesting tidbits floating around? Any old DOS-era or early-Windows-era code, for example? I wonder if (with great effort) I could build something for Win3.1. (Of course I realize I'm not describing LO at all here)
2000 is pretty old, as tech goes, surely something fun got captured. The only reason I can see for super-old code not floating around somewhere is that it was explicitly excluded.