Re: short minute of meeting at guadec

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Sun, 2002-04-07 at 00:46, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote:
> Let's get a Gnome Office.
>
yeah, let's get it!

> Jody, Jon, Dom, SamTh, Cuenca, Ken, ??, Hub, Andrew, Frank, Uraeus, Rui
> 
> Jody:
>  - The 'office' word is very important to visibility
>  - Layers that can be worked out
>    We should release a gnome-office 1.0 (gnumeric 1.x, abiword 1.x, etc)
>    Even if not too integrated, it will carry a lot of users.
>    
most of the GO apps use Bonobo, so it shouldn't be too difficult to have
a little integration with a little effort.

> Jon:
>  - gnomeoffice has to have guppi because gnumeric and gnucash depend on it
> 
> All:
> Potential Gnome Office apps:
>   gnumeric
>   abiword
>   dia
>   sodipodi
>   ask around for more
> 
gnome-db is also ready to be a GNOME Office application, even though
it's not 1.0 yet :-). gnome-db uses heavily Bonobo, which is, in my
opinion, the thing to use as the glue for GNOME Office apps.

> Jody:
>  - gtk? for a future...
>  - present: advantages from using glib (unlimited undo redo, and other
>             cool stuff)
>  - use more shared elements (like a shared zippy file), embbeding stuff
> 
one of the best things we should start doing is to move the different
filters for file formats to a libgnomeoffice. So, the question is, what
do you think about moving the different filters being used in gnumeric,
abiword, etc to that libgnomeoffice? How difficult would that be for
cross-platforms apps such as abiword?

This will give us a lot of integration, since we'll be able to
understand all formats in all GO applications, and that will allow us to
do very nice things, such as creating a gnumeric spreadsheet directly
from gnome-db, without knowing about any specific CORBA interface or
whatever.

> Dom:
>  - there's zippios (koffice and open office folks got really happy about it --
>    we too)
> 
what's zippios? I've just googgled for it and nothing was found :-(

> Jody:
>  - escher drawings... how? There's no reasonable way to do it xp.
>    what canvas can be used?
>  - there should be a 
>  - worries with open office:
>       * a lot of people use it.
>       * star office is charged for money, but if there's money coming, there
>         going to be accounting, and an year or two from now, when sun may be
>         worried for cash it could happen that they very well stop supporting it.
> 
> SamTh:
>  - reasons to use gtk in other platforms: pango -- it is really good
> 
> Jody:
>  - pango is planned to provide printing support (Dom: fabulous... I'd even help
>    with that)
>  - I will need to hack on gnome-print
> 
> SamTh:
>  - talked with Keith Packard and we can solve our fonts problem by "embedding
>    fonts -- rms I understood this right?"
> 
> Jody:
>  - despair: if we do not share more code, when (if) oo dies, we'll have to
>    climb the hill again
>
yeah, that's a very strong reason to start right now a libgnomeoffice

>  - common code for undo redo, emf, wmf, plugins, etc...
>
Joaquin Cuenca just implemented an undo/redo system for Glade2 (the
rewriting of glade), so we might want to put that code in that
libgnomeoffice.

>  - will check zippios out
>  - will clean up io abstraction
>
what does that mean?

well, as a last thing, let me say that I am really interested in getting
GO out ASAP, so you can count on my help for anything about it. So, yes,
let's get a GNOME Office.

cheers
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> - <rodrigo ximian com>
http://www.gnome-db.org/ - http://www.ximian.com/