Published Entities
A newer feature of Apache OpenOffice is the UNOIDL published keyword. If you mark a declaration (of a struct, interface, service, etc.) as published, you give the guarantee that you will not change the declaration in the future, so that clients of your API can depend on that. On the other hand, leaving a declaration unpublished is like a warning to your clients that the declared entity may change or even vanish in a future version of your API. The idlc will give an error if you try to use an unpublished entity in the declaration of a published one, as that would not make sense.
The Apache OpenOffice API has always been intended to never change in incompatible ways. This is now reflected formally by publishing all those entities of the Apache OpenOffice API that were already available in previous API versions. Some new additions to the API have been left unpublished, however, to document that they are probably not yet in their final form. When using such additions, keep in mind that you might need to adapt your code to work with future versions of Apache OpenOffice. Generally, each part of the Apache OpenOffice API should stabilize over time, however, and so each addition should eventually be published. Consider this as a means in attempting to make new functionality available as early as possible, and at the same time ensure that no APIs are fixed prematurely, before they have matured to a truly useful form.
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