Abiword & Gnome (was: Re: What is GNOME office?)

[Chema Celorio <chema celorio com>]

I took a dive inside the Abiword code recently to help Dom
finish the gnome-print support. Since abiword uses Gtk as
their base Unix platafom (and they seem to want to keep it
that way) they can't rely on gnome-only libraries in *nix.
They can use them, but not rely on them.

For example libglade. [*1]

Abiword hackers have to hand code the dialogs for the gtk
verison, then subclass the dialog for GNOME. For this reason,
libglade is out of the question. The amount of time devoted
to doing dialogs could be considerably reduced just by the
use of libglade. Go write a couple of dialogs in Abiword,
then write a couple of dialogs for gnumeric and you will see
what I am talking about. (and redesign them a month from now)

Talking about the reasons behind having a gtk only version
with the abiword developers they told me that they want to
keep it so that it would run on x, y & z plataforms that
gtk is ported to and gnome-libs is not (sam pointed HP-UX
& BSD). I don't know if the amount of work devoted to hand
coding the dialogs is greater than the amount of code needed
to port GNOME to another plataform, say HP-UX.

Ok, so after all this random mumble you must be thinking

"Chema, what's your point ?".

My point is that Abiword does not even want to be a
GNOME app in *nux, they want *2* suported versions,
the gtk one and the GNOME one. "Whats wrong with this ??"
well, its just more work.

regards,
Chema

[1* they consider libglade a gnome-only library, since it
ships with GNOME but not with gtk. And thus, not want
to be a dependency for their *nix version]