Re: Becoming part of Gnome Office

[Martin Sevior <msevior physics unimelb edu au>]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Rodrigo Moya wrote:

> On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 18:31, Brian Bruns wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I'm working on an application that I would like to become integrated with 
> > Gnome Office.  It's the graphical component of MDB Tools, which for those 
> > who haven't heard of it is a reverse engineering effort for MS Access 
> > databases (mdb files).  I've recently spent time porting it from 
> > Gtk-only/Gnome 1.x to Gnome 2.0 and converting over to using libglade.  A 
> > screen shot can be seen at 
> > 
> > http://mdbtools.sourceforge.net/gmdb/gmdb2screenshot.png [132K]
> > 
> nice!
> 
> > to give you a rough idea of what it does.  But, in general, it's a tool 
> > for dealing with Access databases under linux/*nix, which is something 
> > currently missing from all the open office suites.
> > 
> > So, my questions...What does it take to become part of Gnome Office, what 
> > types of things should be implemented wrt bonobo, gnome-print, et al?
> > 
> > One last thing, this is not any kind of competition with Gnome-DB, indeed 
> > Gnome-DB access providers will use the libmdb from MDB Tools.  This 
> > application is intended for making use of legacy data in MDB format.  
> > Right now support is limited to read-only catalog, table data and schema 
> > information, but I'll be adding write support, exporting of Access forms 
> > to Glade XML format, doing something with the embeded VBA script and Gnome 
> > Basic (TBD), and other very specific Access things that Gnome-DB will 
> > never support being a general solution.
> > 
> I (and the whole gnome-db project) don't see gmdb as competition , but I
> think you should see us as competition, since as we progress, we add
> more and more features to cover most features in most DBMS. So, although
> I think we would never cover 100% of access features, most of them might
> be covered, which could (I hope not) make you lose some users.
> 
> Anyway, as things stand now, gmdb is the best thing by far for MS Access
> databases on *nix, so you don't have to worry for now :-)
> 

Could libgda be extended to to include gmdb as a data source? That way all 
the other gnome-office applications would have access to *.mbd files. This 
could significantly enhance the ability of Gnome-office to inter-operate 
with MS Office particularly in Business settings which make extensive use 
of MS Access. I see this as a significant advance where everyone wins.

gmdb gains more users, libgda gains more users, AbiWord and Gnumeric gain 
more users.


Cheers

Martin