Re: Gnome Office summary from the Gnome Summit.

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 07:00:51PM +0100, Bill Haneman wrote:
> Though I am very supportive of gnumeric and abiword, and should say up
> front that I was, regrettably, unable to attend the GNOME-Office talk
> due to a schedule conflict, I am a bit sorry to see almost no mention of
> OpenOffice.org in these minutes.

There is some work towards collaboration, both Gnumeric and Abi are
adopting the OO zip file conventions for structured storages.
Ideally there will also be agreement for things like clipboard
conventions as these solidify.

Sadly there is little else going on.  Potential sources of
discussion are

- Code sharing
    This seems fairly unlikely in the near term given the
    development states of our respective projects.  OO has at least
    partial (generally far more) implementations of most relevant
    subsystems.  Making those subsystems available to non OO
    projects is difficult due to the different platforms.  Replacing
    those subsystems with a new external shared versions also seems
    doomed to failure.  Unless the new code is substantially better
    than OO's existing tested versions it would probably be easier
    for OO developers to improve their own than go through the pain
    of replacing things.
    
- Docs sharing
    OO has done an exemplary job here.  The XLS format docs are an
    excellent starting point.  However, this is a long slow process
    that is not terribly user visible.

- Test suites
    This is an area that seems ripe for the plucking.  To the best
    of my knowledge we've done little but exchange existing test
    suites last year.  OO's user community would be ideal to help
    extend the set of detailed test files in various formats.
    Gnumeric users have begun the process for MS Excel and Lotus,
    but it is a huge task.