Re: What is GNOME office?

["Ray Strode" <halfline hawaii rr com>]

What is GNOME office?

That question is the subject line to a very lengthy thread.  I think
that maybe, in order to find the answer, we must first look at what
an office suite is.  

An office suite is a collection of programs that are useful for doing 
business-type work.  But it's more than that; each program is closely 
tied with every other program in the group.  That definition may seem
obvious, but I think that a lot of people on these mailing lists are losing
sight of it.  The programs that go in GNOME office need to be 
programs that will interoperate well together.  Bonobo will be very 
nice for helping that.  However, I think that runtime interoperability is
not enough.  The code bases need to be similar.  Programs that are
written alike will run alike.  Now why am I saying this?  Well, I 
suppose it is in regard to the somewhat heated discussion about
word processors.  In my opinion, neither Star Office or ABI word, are
really ready to be official GNOME word processors.  Neither 
codebase is written in GNOME (Although, ABI uses gnome under
the hood, for it's X version).  Sun is on the right track though.
They realize that Star Office is not GNOME compliant, so they
released Open Office-a code fork of Star Office-that can be
modified to be as GNOME compliant as needed.  Is ABI willing to
do the same?  As long as ABI is soley cross-platform, it will never
be able to integrate with GNOME as much as would be required to
be considered part of GNOME office. Cross platform development
is a great, but it is not inline with what GNOME is, right now.  And
so, any part that is a core GNOME part, cannot be cross platform.
(Ofcourse, by cross platform, i mean to Windows, because GNOME
runs on many unixen).
If ABI does split there code or abandon cross platform development
all together, then they can be considered.  Whoever gets chosen, is 
really rather irrelevent.  Neither product was started with GNOME in
mind and both products have a lot of cross platform baggage. 
Basically, all xp code is going to have to be ripped out or rewritten to
use GNOME native calls.  

Just a few thoughts

--Ray Strode