Re: Decoupling GNOME Office?

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

Although the release of the various office applications need not be
bundled with Gnome-1.4 they should be released shortly after 1.4.
Potentially there would even be a configure test
    'Checking for Gnome 1.4'

I've been receiving email questioning the continued development of
Gnumeric.
eg.
> The "announcement" indicates that:
>    "The GNOME Foundation has announced that it is adopting OpenOffice.org
>    ... as the core of the office productivity software for GNOME Office."
> 
> That could be taken to indicate that Gnumeric _won't_ be part of 
> GNOME Office.
> 
> Or it could be taken to indicate that the "Star Office stuff" will become
> GNOME Office, and that there may well be all sorts of "Office stuff"
> that is part of GNOME, but not part of what they call "GNOME Office."

The unfortunate wording has led to alot of confusion.  Some form of
branded 'Gnome Office' bundle would help clarify things.

Another point that has come up is the desirability of 'integration'
for the gnome office meta project.  It seems clear that we are
nowhere near transforming all of the disparate applications that have
been branded 'officish' into a single package (ala koffice), nor
does that seem desirable.  However, much has been said of Bonobo
and the GNOME project's component based architecture.  These
represent useful goals and we should start to work towards increased
Bonobification of the apps.

There are also several overlapping functionalities.  Currently many
applications have written their own plugin management system, and
have their own unique approach to handling paths for their support
files (glade, png ...).  There are also several overlapping widgets
that are also being replicated.  We should enable the gnome-app-libs
module soon.  Ideally before the gnome 1.4 release.  This will give
us a location to move so of the common functionality and will help
offer a more consistent approach.