[Framework-Team] Re: transforms

[Hanno Schlichting]

Thierry Benita wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A remark about transforms in Plone.
> 
> atReal did a piece of work about transforms, with AROfficeTransforms,
> the last PastisSprint and some work in progress.
> We also work close to Hanno on the transform engine since the sprint.
> 
> We are adding transforms to plone.transforms, but it looks like there is
> a licence issue at some point because we sometime need to include some
> code that is published under free licence (mostly GPL) but we don't own
> the code, and it is therefore impossible to give that code to the
> Foundation.

It is perfectly fine to add code to the Plone SVN repository which is
owned by somebody else as long as it is clearly marked as such. We are
doing this in CMFPlone itself (where we have separated it slightly in
form of an svn:external reference for JavaScript libraries for example)
but other places with direct inclusions as well.

> This is especially true for openoffice xslt transforms (that rely on a
> modified xslt sheet from opendocumentfellowship) and windows transforms
> that need to embeed binaries if we want them to be easy to install.

>From what I can tell plone.opendocument includes those xslt transforms
as well. I'd rather like to see one implementation of openoffice support
for Plone. Joscha just told me he'll be coming to the Plone conference
and he's determined keep working on plone.opendocument for a while, so
I'd rather see his work being supported by others.

For the external binaries I think we need to rethink the way we do our
development environments, distributions and installers for the next
major Plone version anyways. We already started discussion around this
on the plone-devel list (zc.buildout-based installers?) and I'm sure we
will come up with something new here.

The way in which we provide those binaries to further enhance the OOTB
experience of Plone is a bit dependent on that discussion.

> My proposal is to embeed AROfficeTransforms in the Plone bundle or
> package. We may change the name if it is an issue.
> 
> This would provide a full solution for indexing and previews (other
> proposal) out of the box without licence issue.

I'm not sure what exactly AROfficeTransforms provides here. For the
actual transforms I hope we will have all of them covered in or based on
plone.transforms in a short time.

The preview feature is something which in my opinion should either be
included directly into Archetypes (if it is just  a tiny bit of code and
some changes needed in AT itself anyways) or made available as a new
archetypes.preview package.

Hanno