Re: Decoupling GNOME Office?

[Matthew Berg <galt gothpoodle com>]

On 29 Aug 2000, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> Well right now we're stuffing all the semi-mature ones in the GNOME
> release itself. I think it makes release coordination siginificantly
> more difficult to have a bunch of large applications mixed in with the
> development platform and core desktop. If folks really think that
> tight integration is a prerequisite to releasing a bunch of apps as
> "GNOME Office" (and I don't - integration is one desirably feature in
> an office suite, but not a litmus test for releasing at all, IMO) we
> could simply drop the large apps from the GNOME release and release
> them all separately at about the same time as GNOME 1.4.
>
> In either case, I think it's bad to include office suite components
> with the core release, and a bad idea to wait until they are all ready
> and well-integrated before splitting them off.
>  
>  - Maciej

To be honest, I would venture to say that the issue is that too much is
being put into the Gnome release itself.  In my mind, Gnome proper should
be the libraries, the desktop environment, and a minimal set of utilities
and small applications.  Something more akin to what Windows or MacOS
ships by default.

As long as Gnome remains a stable development platform, there's no reason
why individual applications can't follow their own release
cycles.  Leave it to the various distributions and Helix to package and
ship them along with the core.

(Note: I would say that integration is a litmus test for an office suite
nowadays.  We're dealing with a category of software where, like it or
not, Microsoft Office is the gold standard.  Integration is an
expectation, not a perk.)

Matt