Blogging Roller

Ted Husted: The OpenOffice suite provides an interesting opportunity for open source products. Since the suite is free, open source, and multiplatform, using this tool with our projects is little different than using Subversion or Ant.

Problem is, the format is not change-log friendly. By design, all changes made to a ASF product are logged to one of the mailing lists, where they become part of our "communal memory". When a change is made to an OpenOffice document and checked into the repository, it is logged as a change to a binary file. No one watching the project knows what changed unless they spend several minutes opening the document and reviewing the internal change log.

Albeit, Roller is deliberating whether to use the OpenOffice to maintain it's user documentation. The vote is pending now. Since OpenOffice can save to multiple formats, my suggestion is that we also checkin a companion HTML document, so that everyone can see what changes in real time. We'd contnue to edit the ODF file, and just Save As to HTML before checking in both files. Film at 11.

Yes that's right: Ted Husted (of Struts fame) is blogging!

Plus, Ted has been participating on the Roller dev list and most recently raising some issues with the use of OpenOffice.org for our user and install guides. As you can see, Ted's biggest concern is that, when docs are in a binary format it is hard to monitor doc changes by watching the diffs in SVN commit notifications. Does your open source project use OpenOffice.org and if so, how did you deal with this issue?