Re: What is GNOME office?

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com>]

> Is there a mentality that anything not developed by Helix isn't considered a 
> true Gnome app? And you claim we're not using any of the gnome framework? Go 
> figure. Had me fooled. Those lines of code must be linking against some 
> mystery KDE2 C-based library with their GTK+ theme engine enabled...

We are not developing a word processor at Helix ;-).  I said something
like:

	`when we *were* looking into supporting a word processor, we
	considered doing our own instead of using Abi because XX and
	YY'.

Notice the "*were*" above.  When Sun told us they would be releasing
an entire office suite, it did not make any sense to write another
word processor.

> Jody comes out and says that Gnumeric doesn't have all of the features that 
> StarCalc or Excel has. He says that he's looking into improving Gnumeric 
> with ideas/code from SO. You (rightfully) applaud him. We say that we're not 
> as feature-complete as MSWord and are looking into adopting SO code/ideas 
> and we're told that we're not robust and to go screw ourselves because Helix 
> is going to come up with their on WP anyway. WTF??

Well, I know the Gnumeric code base, and I know how much future it
has, and I know where the unstabilities are.  Gnumeric has been very
carefully coded.  The impression I get from AbiWord is that it was
very unstable.  

Helix *does* ship AbiWord, and it is probably one of the applications
that crashes the most when people try to do anything interesting with
it.  Maybe this is subjective, but I can tell you that the Helix GNOME
team kept asking me `Why do we ship Abi, it is full of bugs'.

> It seems that it would be a lot easier to help us out with our
> missing features and bugs instead of coding your own WP. But hey,
> that's what open source is about. You run Helix, not me.

You are very confused.  We are not developing a WP.  

> To conclude, I'm tired of this "Abi isn't a gnome app" mentality. We've 
> really put a lot of effort into Abi. I hate to get slighted like this.

Maybe my impression was miss-guided, but developers still do not use
the GNOME API in Abi, my understanding is that they had to code
against the XP API.  

Miguel.