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On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Can someone explain why the Wikimedia Commons accepts uploads of printable PDF documents (e.g. brochures) but not the editable source version in Open Document Format (e.g. .ODT). This seems to violate the open source principle.
ODT and other ZIP-based types are currently disabled on the public sites until we've nailed down ZIP-based file security a bit better. (It's enabled on the private sites; we have a basic file type check to confirm that the file really thinks its an ODF of the appropriate extension, but not yet checks to confirm there's not evil Java classes also sitting in the ZIP etc.)
If someone would like to do some work on that, that'd be super -- we haven't really been prioritizing it yet as there's not a lot of call for ODF files outside the private working-group wikis.
There's an optional zip extension for PHP which should include support for listing out the ZIP file directory; however since this isn't included in PHP by default it might be nice to be able to read the directory independently without the extension for general MediaWiki installs. (It shouldn't be necessary to actually decompress anything for our purposes here -- we're mainly looking for subfiles not expected in an ODF, particularly Java classes that could be used for a session attack.)
Mohamed Magdy wrote:
I just uploaded a hybrid pdf and it is working properly. you could use that until ODFs are allowed.
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/06/pdf-import-hybrid-odf-pdfs-extension-30.html
I'd tend to recommend against that; if the edit updating isn't transparent you're likely to have things get out of sync, or at least just be kind of confusing.
On the other hand, it is nice to be able to have a PDF form for people to download and print without needing to install the behemoth that is OpenOffice. :)
- -- brion