Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

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

On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Michael Meeks wrote:

> Hi Martin,
> 
> On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 04:48, Martin Sevior wrote:
> > A word processor and a presentation program. 
> 
> 	Building good infrastructure is really important for code reuse, code
> re-use can result in fewer bugs, a more coherent platform, far less
> duplication of effort etc.

Right. Spend two years building the platform and in the meantime KOffice
eats our lunch....

> 
> 	Mono will allow lots more code re-use, and cross language code re-use
> which with luck will help us integrate the various open source projects
> into a utopian mega development project :-) 

Hey I think Mono sounds pretty cool too.

> ok ok, anyway whatever
> happens it is well worth investing in shared infrastructure, and the
> thing that worries me most about the AbiWord team is my perception that
> they refuse to sensibly re-use / depend on the hard work other people
> have done to make their life easy [1] instead consuming time and
> creating complexity by abstracting it all. [2]
> 

Actually we steal code wherever we can. Our complexity? AbiWord is
straight forward compared to trying to fathom Object Oriented programing
done in C. I don't even know where I can buy a book that would teach me
that. Let alone IDL/Corba etc.

Regarding both these points, now we have a nice plugin architecture we can
easily wrap other useful Gnome projects. Plus roll our own as desired.

 > 	Oh - and there's the human interest aspect, the Mono developers are 
> really having a lot of fun and are hyper-kinetic-Miguel-motivated
> hackers, they have achieved a staggering amount in a short time, and
> they love the task at hand and that means a lot.
> 

That's great :-) I love coding too. It's the fun part about working for
free. I go and do stuff just coz it's fun.

> 	I was a little blown away to see Dietmar's work on monoburg which
> compiles a YACC like language into a fast jit eg. :-) [ reportedly
> faster than Kaffe already ].
> 
> > In any case we at AbiWord will keep on coding in whatever time we
> > can snatch.
> 
> 	Great :-) you guys are doing some wonderful work, it seems despite the
> limitations you impose on yourselves ;-) each to his own.
>

It's hard being genuinely cross platform but it does impose rigour. This
pays off in the end. In addition the market we're available to is about a
factor of 100 times greater than if we were a Gnome only project.

> 	Regards,
> 
> 		Michael.
> 
> [1] - even when that code could easily be ported to platform FooBarBaz.

Please port Gnome to Windows.

> [2] - NB. of course, not necessarily true, but my perception, eg.
> 	+ "It doesn't print to PDF" feature request which should really be
> 	+ "It doesn't use gnome-print on every platform, and so someone gets to
> re-invent chunks of gnome-print in AbiWord which hasn't been done yet"

Bad example. PDF from gnome-print is barely usable. A simple two page doc
blows out to 500 kB :-(. I'll use ps2pdf in the future.

> 	And yes - I know not all AbiWord developers think / want this, but it
> seems to be the consensus, that some loss of service on QNX is
> unacceptable, and that re-writing inside AbiWord is better than porting
> outside AbiWord.
> 	Hopefully the far superior portability of Gtk+2.0 / Gnome 2.0 will
> enable us to start fixing these issues at root.
> 

Yes indeed. Gtk 2.0 will help.

Cheers

Martin