Re: What is GNOME office?

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

On 18 Nov 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 
> Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com> writes:
> >  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'.
> 
> This complaint is totally invalid/irrelevant when talking about
> explicitly unstable devel versions of software. If you ship it it's
> your own fault. You get both pieces.
> 
> (Red Hat ships it too I think - but we aren't flaming the AbiWord team
> about the fact that it's unstable, because they told us that.)
> 
> And from a technical standpoint, bug count and stability may or may
> not be an indicator of code quality and future
> potential. Enlightenment doesn't crash that often, but try hacking on
> it sometime. Mozilla went from totally unusable, crashy, and slow to
> reasonably stable and fast in only a few months once they had spent a
> year and a half doing most of the work for a clean architecture and
> finally focused on fixing bugs.
> 

Actually I find debugging Abi to be quite easy. I can usually fix any
given bug within an hour or two. I'm sure I'd find
debugging Gnumeric REALLY hard. Some day I'll look at your code to see
how you can write a complex, multi-View program in C.  I don't mean this
as flame bait but I'm very new to GUI programming and Abi is my one point
of reference. I certainly like Abi's clean design.

I'm quite confident that once we reach feature completeness and squashing
bugs becomes our main priority we will successfully make Abi at least as
stable as MS Word 97. In fact I'm sure we will not ship 1.0 if we know of
ANY way to crash it.

Cheers

Martin