This was requested by a potential user, as they want to be able to do
whatever they want to do to these lists with a spreadsheet.
In fact, they requested to be able to export to CSV, but, as always,
using CSV is a minefield because of Microsoft: since their Excel product
is fucking unable to write and read CSV from different locales, even if
using the same exact Excel product, i can not also create a CSV file
that is guaranteed to work on all locales. If i used the non-standard
sep=; thing to tell Excel that it is a fucking stupid application, then
proper applications would show that line as a row, which is the correct
albeit undesirable behaviour.
The solution is to use a spreadsheet file format that does not have this
issue. As far as I know, by default Excel is able to read XLSX and ODS
files, but i refuse to use the artificially complex, not the actually
used in Excel, and lobbied standard that Microsoft somehow convinced ISO
to publish, as i am using a different format because of the mess they
made, and i do not want to bend over in front of them, so ODS it is.
ODS is neither an elegant or good format by any means, but at least i
can write them using simple strings, because there is no ODS library
in Debian and i am not going to write yet another DEB package for an
overengineered package to write a simple table—all i want is to say
“here are these n columns, and these m columns; have a good day!”.
Part of #51.
