Re: GNOME Office list, and Sun/AbiWord

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela <cuenca celium net>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Sevior" <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au>
To: "Havoc Pennington" <hp@redhat.com>
Cc: "Jon Trowbridge" <trow@emccta.com>; <gnome-1.4-list@gnome.org>;
<gnome-devel-list@gnome.org>; <gnome-hackers@gnome.org>; "Dom Lachowicz"
<cinamod@hotmail.com>; "Joaquín Cuenca Abela" <cuenca@celium.net>; "sam th"
<sam@uchicago.edu>
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2000 3:59 AM
Subject: Re: GNOME Office list, and Sun/AbiWord


>
>
> On 30 Aug 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> >
> > Martin Sevior <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au> writes:
> > > From what I know of staroffice it
> > > does not have Abi's GUI independence which makes this simultaneous
> > > development possible.
> > >
> >
> > I have heard that Sun intends to continue to make StarOffice cross
> > platform. Remember that it is XP now. I'm not sure how they will
> > implement XP, but you could talk about it with them. (Right now I
> > think they have an XP toolkit in the Java/Swing tradition, maybe they
> > are planning to move to GTK as XP toolkit. I don't know.)
>
> Who do we talk to? As far as I know their previous code was based on
> 3-rd party cross platform toolkit.
>
> >
> > > 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.
> > >
> >
> > Don't decide until you talk to Sun. Maybe they are willing to adopt
> > some of the AbiWord goals.
> >
>
> I agree. However this was my impression only.

We can colaborate in some fields, even if we pospone the question of a
posible merge.

For instance, we can start doing a real GnomeCanvasRichTextItem (wich is
needed by some other apps), and start doing a good filters lib (problem: we
must base the code in wv or in the StarOffice filters?) and the spellchecker
(I think that we must use pspell...), etc.

I think that the big question that we (we = the Abiword devel team) have to
ask to ourselves: Do we want to abandone the actual XP scheme (where the
portability is achieved at the app level) and switch to a pure Gtk+ (xor
Gnome) version or do we want to stay with the actual scheme?

If we want to stay with the current scheme, I don't think that a fusion with
StarWriter will be possible...

I *really* don't want to start a new flamewar, so, please, consider this
question like a technical one.  I know that everybody is busy trying hard to
reach AbiWord 1.0, and nobody wants to change the current XP scheme before
1.0, but, do we want a gtk+ pure AbiWord 2.0 (mixed with StarWriter)?

I think that if we want a full featured wordprocessor, it would be a pity to
miss the oportunity to merge with StarWriter (we want, both, a complete
multiplatform wordprocessor. We have *exactly* the same goal).

(P.S. Is there any mailing list more apropiate to these discussions?
gnome-office-list?)

--
Joaquín Cuenca Abela
email: cuenca@celium.net