Re: Oaf names & file structure

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Sun, Nov 19, 2000 at 05:50:01PM -0800, Mathieu Lacage wrote:
> If you want gnumeric, it is because you want to do something with
> it.  So, let's imagine you want to display a file through
> gnumeric.  If you want to do this, you should not force gnumeric
> but use teh default application/component which the user has
> choosen to display spreadsheets. The gnome-vfs mime databse stores
> such data.
> 
> So, I do not think this is a very good example.

This requires an ideal world in which all components are created
equal.  There are always assumptions in a larger applications that
eventually result in different behaviours.  I agree that if the goal
was to display something that looks like a spreadsheet then any old
implementation will do.  However, if the intention is the actually
calculate something, we are far better off using the explicit
calculation engine that the coordinating application is requesting.
As someone that spends his daylight working hours doing fiddly
spreadsheet calculations, I can promise that changing versions of
calculators is something not taken lightly.  Gnumeric has more
robust statistics calculations than MS Excel (tm).  God help us if
someone installs a new copy of Office 13.25k which just happens to
diddle the mime database on one machine in the compute farm.
Tracking the miscalculation would take weeks.