Re: More Political Stuff.

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

On 25 Aug 2000, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On 25 Aug 2000, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > > 
> > > Also the issue with StarOffice.  I've used StarOffice a couple times,
> > > along with ApplixWare, and my God did they ever suck horribly.  Is
> > > StarOffice REALLY going to be the official GNOME desktop?  Why can't we
> > > develop our own software?  We have Gnumeric, and AbiWord could be great
> > > too if it got worked on more (its development seems Gods-awful slow to
> > > me).  We have Dia, and GIMP, etc.  What true point is there to using
> > > StarOffice?  I mean, options are nice, but there needs to be one
> > > official office suite, and I honestly think GNOME needs its own, not a
> > > borrowed office suite that isn't that good to begin with.  Porting the
> > > code to GNOME-libs and bonobo would probably take more time than just
> > > writing our own: I know I find development a hell of a lot easier than
> > > porting code to new API's.
> > 
> > The abiword hackers haven't been in touch with SUN at all about Star
> > Office. We should do this but we've been too busy doing stuff we need
> > for 1.0. Expect lots of Gnome (and other) goodies after the 0.7.11 release
> > (due Real Soon Now). However 0.7.11 is mainly step along the way. Although
> > we've made about 700 commits over the last 2 months a lot of it is behind
> > the scenes stuff that isn't immediately obvious. Building a word processor
> > is hard work. We will keep hacking though. Hopefully Sun will help us.
> > We've already got the foundation they need. Fully GUI independence, an
> > active and lively development community and other stuff they'll want too.  
> > 
> 
> OK! Is there a status page on the abisource site?  It's a lot easier to
> keep track of this stuff that way than downloading CVS code, or trying
> to make sense of most ChangeLogs.
> 

Sorry that would be too much work and anyway it keeps evolving. One month
ago I thought our BeOS port was dead. Now it's fully up to date and we've
got some seriously good new developers from the BeOS community helping us.

The best way to see where we are going is to checkout the
development list archives.

http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/

Look at the recent posts from Dom and Thomas Flectcher in particular. I
don't like to talk about vapour-ware code but I trust Dom to deliver. I
have a lot to do with the lists implementation though and I think we soon
have THE best implementation in a WYSIWYG WP. We will continue to make
each feature we implement the best we can think of.

We want abiword to take full advantage of all the great infrastructure
available in gnome but even if starwriter is developed totally
independently of us we will continue. The abiword community wants
everybody to be able to use a state of the art WP no matter what OS or
computer they use. So never fear, even if starwriter is blessed as the WP
for gnome, there will be an alternative in abiword.

Abi also dispells the myth that you can't write C++ GUI code with GTK+.
Although the gtk dialogs are a lot more verbose than the C++ GUI stuff for
Windows and BeOS, the GTK+ dialogs are quite easy to implement. Just fire
up glade and it does the work for you :-)

The GUI stuff in abi is easy. The backend stuff is hard.

Cheers

Martin Sevior