Re: Decoupling GNOME Office?

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

On 30 Aug 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 
> 
> Jon Trowbridge <trow@emccta.com> writes: 
> > While I have no a priori objections to doing anything under the
> > openoffice.org banner, their "discuss" list already seems to get a
> > fair amount of traffic on StarOffice-specific topics (feature
> > requests, their C++ API, etc.)  It therefore might not be the best
> > place to hash out questions of identity and purpose for GNOME Office.
> > 
> > So I guess my vote for gnome-office@mail.gnome.org...
> > 
> 
> OK. Keep in mind though, the idea is to merge the OpenOffice project
> and the GNOME Office project. So either they have to move over here,
> or we have to move over there. Hopefully the GNOME Office people have
> been hearing from Sun on this (I know there have been some talks with
> the Gnumeric people, I don't know otherwise). 

Havoc has told us gnome would like Abiword to merge with openoffice.  We
have not heard from anyone at SUN (except on other matters from one of our
developers who now works there). Frankly unless their new code is based on
Abiword I don't see how a merger is possible. We have two talented
developers who are working on Gnome integration. Because of the great
architecture of both abiword and bonobo it appears possible to do this in
about 3 months. The other people in the project contribute on their own
development platforms (Linux, Windows, BeOS, QNX and MaCOS). Our non-Gnome
developrs will work on both the central codebase to implement useful WP
features like lists, headers/footers, page setup and eye-candy for their
own platforms.  Everyone wants Abiword to succeede everywhere but a large
number would be both uninterested and unable to develop for soley for
Gnome. That's not to say they don't want Abi to succede on Gnome, but they
don't want to drop their own platforms. From what I know of staroffice it
does not have Abi's GUI independence which makes this simultaneous
development possible.

We can share code and ideas but I don't see a merger happening unless Sun
adopts the Abiword code base and helps us develop it.

It would have been nice to have been in the loop about this earlier.
Abiword has contributed over 300,000 lines of code to Gnome and provides
the 4th most useful program to normal users (after filemanager, email and
web browser).

Maybe it was our fault for not joining these mailing lists earlier.

 > 
> Are there actually topics people want to discuss on
> gnome-office@gnome.org or will it be as quiet as the workshop list?

Well topics like this would be a natural thing to discuss. As Bonobo
integration rolls forward we would like to hear from the gnumeric team,
gnome-print, guppi and anyone else who wants their app to be embedded in
Abiword documents.

Martin Sevior