Re: Beagle roadmap.

[Veerapuram Varadhan <vvaradhan novell com>]

On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 10:37 -0400, Nat Friedman wrote:
> We have no objection to using useful, well-maintained libraries in
> Beagle, wherever they come from.  There's no corporate agenda on that
> point.  I doubt customers would even notice.
> 
Yes.  We won't mind using such libraries.

> I don't know if there are technical issues with using AbiWord libs,
> but
> I think in general we'd be utterly psyched to have this functionality.
> I'll let the full-time hackers chime in if they have issues.  My guess
> is we'd like to see the code :-).
IINW, Martin wants to have a "running instance of Abiword" to filter
word processor docs (??).  We really don't have issues if:

1)  Instead of Abiword process, a libAbiwordFilter can be used, which
will make beagle "sort-of" independent and beagle filters don't have to
spawn "Abiword" process for each and every word processor document.
(correct me if your code works in a different way)

2)  We can filter the contents in single pass, (ie) pulling out the text
along with the attributes in the first pass itself.  I really don't know
how Martin's code works, however, I am just listing out things that a
beagle filter needs. :-)

The general rules of thumb that beagle filters use are:

1)  Try to use well-maintained, usable libraries.
2)  If no such libraries exists, write our own filters using file-format
specifications, as beagle filters require very basic information from
files/file format structures.
3)  If 1) and 2) doesn't exist or not found and there are certain word
processors available that support these formats, try to extract the part
of code and try to port it.
4)  As a last resort, "spawn a process", but this might not give all the
information that "beagle" requires.

Jon.. whats your opinion on these thumb-rules???  [probably we should
update the wiki with these thumb-rules...]

Best Regards,

V. Varadhan.