Description: ------------ I started looking through Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and comparing it to Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer, hoping to find the cause of many bugs. The changes, by and large, are not giant; but without test suites, they are hard to verify. John McNamara sez: There isn't any public CVS or SVN archive. All of the previous versions are available here as tar balls: http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/J/JM/JMCNAMARA/ Most of the PHP ports that I have seen are based on the Excel 5 version of Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, i.e. versions <= 1.01. There was a significant change in the code base for the Excel 97 versions, i.e. >= 2.01, and there has been 13 not insignificant revisions since then. In short, getting the PHP versions up to the Perl version is probably a non trivial task. :-) See also Bug #3986

Smells like it would probably be more suited to just being from scratches, PHP 5 and just port the current perl one over ... Who knows ... If we can find out which version they based the current class from then we can take that Perl version and diff between versions and work our way through the upgrade process but it might be a long and hard approach but gives a better sense of what's happening.

I did start digging through this the other day. Basic plan * Write numerous tests for both the PHP and Perl versions * Write a quick and dirty test runner which compares the output of both * Slowly port away I'd guesstimate it at around 3-4 weekends of messing about; and then a lot longer making sure all of the loose ends are followed up.