Re: [Gramps-devel] Rewriting the GEDCOM export for 3.0

[Jim W. <jim...@gm...>]

On 8/3/07, Don Allingham <don...@co...> wrote:
> I'm planning the reworking the GEDCOM export for 3.0. I'm planning on
> making a few changes. These include:
>
> 1) Dropping trying to match the oddities of each program's
>    interpretation of GEDCOM. Target only the GEDCOM 5.5 standard.

This is a good position if you intend to fully support Gedcom 5.5
compliant information and will put non-compliant information someplace
where it is not lost.  A strictly 5.5 compliance limits how some data
can be shown.

> 2) Reduce the number of options. Provide a "restrict data on living"
>    option without the sub options. Assume that restring means restrict.
>
> General questions:
>
> 1) Is it okay to export using UTF-8 only? Can all programs import UTF-8?
>    ANSEL is a disaster, and I would rather not support it.

This one has my vote as long as the UTF-8 format is faithfully used.
Some programs take as much liberty with UTF-8 as they do with Gedcom.
When I import files that were created in older versions of Reunion,
the UTF-8 setup strings are missing.

>
> 2) How do we handle exporting images? Using full paths or even relative
>    paths makes moving to a different platform awkward. As one solution,
>    I was thinking about allow writing a zip file that contains all the
>    images and the gedcom file, making it easy to move to a different
>    machine. But how do we handle the other cases?

I started out wondering why we would need this and then I thought
through how I move this dta between machines and finally decided this
is a great tool.  It automates what we do manually with the add that
it moves only the media that is actually used.
>
> 3) Do we care about supplying a wide range of copyright notices in the
>    file? Or should we just add a standard copyright message to all
>    GEDCOM files?
>

Jim