Re: Decoupling GNOME Office?

[Joe Shaw <joe helixcode com>]

> Many people have talked about decoupling the release of GNOME Office
> from GNOME itself. I propose we implement this starting with the GNOME
> 1.4 release.

It has never appeared to me that they were coupled in the first place. In
the past, only gnumeric and perhaps dia had new versions released for a
big GNOME release, but we never advertised the fact that such-and-such
version of the GNOME Office, partly because if we did, it'd be a joke.

> A bit after GNOME 1.4, we'd release GNOME Office 1.4, including
> gnumeric, dia, and whatever other apps want to provide versions for it
> (gnucash? AbiWord? achtung? Maybe some OpenOffice components will be
> ready? Maybe the gimp folks want to include a version?)

gnumeric, dia, and gnucash are usable GNOME apps, but they don't integrate
at all, have unified components, or have much (if any) bonobo
support. AbiWord is also usable, but it doesn't really fit in with GNOME
as part of the GNOME Office. Besides, have we ever even heard their
opinion on being put in that category? But it also suffers from the same
problems as above. Achtung, despite probably being the most bonoboized of
the above, simply isn't ready for prime-time, especially in an app that
really needs to be stable for every release.

I can't really see releasing some of the OpenOffice components as the
GNOME Office until we can get them in as core components of the
aforementioned apps, and that is going to take longer than what I think
our timeframe is here.

Lastly, I'd love to see the Gimp as an office app, but it needs to be
GNOMEified, bonoboized, and so forth. And while turning it into a GNOME
app would be a great help for GNOME, I don't forsee the Gimp people moving
in that direction.

The simple fact of the matter is that the GNOME Office components at this
stage are a big, hodge-podgy mess. A few of the developers got together at
OLS to discuss this issue and to start working on solving these problems,
but more time still needs to be focused on the infrastructure rather than
on the apps, and until that work is done, I can't really seeing us have an
integrated "office suite" rather than just a collection of some
mostly-usable productivity apps.

Joe