Re: Beagle roadmap.

[Veerapuram Varadhan <vvaradhan novell com>]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 18:55 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:

> The C-functions take care of all the stuff about making sure the remote
> abiword is running, setting up the communication pipes,
> cleaning up afterward.
> 
> A new abiword is not spawned on every document. We reuse the currently
> running one until it crashes or when you do a finalizeConversions call.
> If the remote AbiWord crashes a new one is spawned.
> 

Sounds nice.  However, according to your suggestion,  

	* for beagle to index word processor documents, *AbiWord* should exist
and this creates a dependency on Beagle and in turn on users to install
AbiWord, which is not *OK*.

In general, Beagle should be independent and should not impose any hard-
restrictions on user that he should install a particular application for
beagle to work.

Jon, what is your opinion on this?

> The advantage of doing things this way is:
> 
> 1. We AbiWord developers don't have to maintain a separate library just
> for Beagle. As the filters for Abiword are improved in the continuous 
> Open source way, Beagle gets them too.
> 
AbiWord developers don't have to maintain a library just for beagle,
rather, it will be handy for AbiWord developers, if, their *filter* code
exists as a library.  Whoever wants to contribute to "filters" have to
just modify the library and not the core AbiWord.  Thus making life
easier for AbiWord developers and other opensource hackers.

Moreover, fixes for filters just modify the library and no changes to
the AbiWord... doesn't that sound nice???!!!!

> 2. You don't have to write a filter for every WP format under the sun.
> Just improve the ones we already have. (Which generally happens in the
> continuous open-source way anyway.)
> 
Obviously, we are not going to write filters for every WP format other
than what we have in our Filters list now.

Given that, I also want to make sure that the Beagle back-end (filters)
will be expanded to support every other WP formats. (maybe Ph-III).

It will be a nice project for someone to make an independent library of
filters from AbiWord or OO.o.

> 4. There is very little performance penalty for doing things this way.
> The process of filling the AbiWord document model is far faster
> than building a view. All you need to do is pass a filename then
> read the resulting text file.
> 
As I said earlier, beagle doesn't want just a *stream of text*...
something bit more... attributes of text like bold, italic, section
head, chapter head, etc.

Cheers,

V. Varadhan.