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

["Dom Lachowicz" <cinamod hotmail com>]

> And why do not switch to gettext? It would be so much easier for 
> translators
> to maintain their translations... Isn't gettext ported to all platforms?
There has been some discussion to do this, but no code. Short story: gettext 
is *not* ported to all of the platforms we support. Our system (though it 
sucks IMO) is. Gettext could be ported, though.

> There is so much code in Abiword that is already in libraries... Gnome
> programs use the libraries. Abiword implements even utility functions by
> itslef... is this useful? Maybe it's easier to port useful libraries to
> other platforms than to create almost everything from scratch?
True enough. Lots of utility code and libraries have been written from 
scratch by the Abi team. Examples include Vectors and Hashes. Then again, 
there is a lot in libraries like GLib that makes it less portable, esp. to 
non-unixes. When they are ported, they sometimes require additional 
libraries (say CYGWIN). Consided GThread. Other things like the STL *still* 
don't work for some compilers. So we can't use the STL either. So 
duplicating the functionality of a *few* of GLib's classes is the solution. 
The result is only a few thousand lines of extremely simple code, so I don't 
think that there's any reason to be complaining... Besides, which library do 
we choose? GLib? WineLib? Others? I'm sure there would be complaining no 
matter what route we went down.

Take, for example, Corel's use of Winelib in its Linux port of CorelOffice 
and how much of a stink it raised on /. because it wasn't "native." No 
normal windows user would use a win32 program based on GTK if it had its 
current look-and-feel. We don't want that...

> As for internationalization -- gettext handles which language interface do
> you want. In Abiword, it seems the only way to select a language is change
> manually ~/.Abisuite/AbiWord.Profile file. Not a convenient way.
IIRC, you can do the LANG/LOCALE unix environment variable trick and it will 
work. We're going to add a dialog for this though, so please be patient.

> And if you want to support real internationalization... It would be too 
> hard
> and uneffective to write your own Gtk+2 and Pango. No other toolkit gives
> you that capabilities. Abiword even does not support charsets correctly, 
> the
> combobox in font selection dialog with only one entry "Placeholder" 
> prevents
> me from using Abiword.
I'll take this under advisement. We *do* handle non-iso-8859 locales in the 
upcoming release, such as: Russian, Czeck, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. 
Perhaps the "lt_LT" locale will work for you "out of the box" when 0.7.12 is 
released. If you want, you can try out our CVS version (0.7.12 is due soon) 
and tell me if things work for you.

There is a *lot* of counter-productive talk here. Some people say: "XXX is 
better than how you do things, and I'm not going to tell you why or help out 
coding or ask why you did YYY instead of XXX."

This is counter-productive. There are plenty of good comments and 
suggestions from a lot of really bright people here. Like all software, Abi 
isn't perfect and could certainly improve. Please just take a little more 
time to explain the pros and cons of your position(s). Perhaps submit a bug 
in our bugzilla or post something to our mailing list. It's bound to 
generate discussion and interest. And as in all OSS projects, code speaks 
louder than words.

Dom
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