Re: Oaf names & file structure

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com> writes:

> 
> 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.
> 

I agree that there are times when you specifically want the Gnumeric
component and nothing else. The prime example would be the gnumeric
application itself, once it's converted to embed the component as it's
main view.

However, I'd like to note that we've not made it easy for apps to
override the mime database preferences at install time. Changes away
from the factory defaults (other than making more apps available for
selection) are left strictly up to the user.

Jody, if you have any particular needs for component activation in
Gnumeric, I'd love to talk about it sometime and make sure a solution
is, or will be, available. The same goes for Evolution or any other
major GNOME program.

 - Maciej