Re: Making Conglomerate part of Gnome Office

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 02:38:21AM +0000, Dave Malcolm wrote:
> 
> I think that Conglomerate ought to become a part of Gnome Office.  In
> fact, Jody gave his blessing to the idea at GUADEC, although this was in
> the pub, and large quantities of Guinness had been consumed :-)

Despite being beer-less at this moment I still agree, with the
standard provision that no app should be released before its time.
 
> Conglomerate isn't yet stable/fast enough for production use, and might
> not yet be ready for integration into your release schedules.

Exactly.  Our current target is to sync our release schedules to
GNOME itself.  The nice solid promises of abi/api stability and the
time based releases make life much much simpler.  Do we want to
start defining two classes of Gnome Office elements ?

    1) stable
    2) cool stuff that going to be stable

Can you project in rough, non-binding terms your confidence level
that a 1.0.x would be feasible for GNOME 2.6 ?

> At the least, please can Conglomerate appear on this page:
> http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/

There is no polite way to describe how unmaintained and out of date
that page is.  I'm working on something to post about it shortly.

> In addition, there are some pieces of code that Conglomerate contains
> that ought to be useful to other office apps.  The main ones are
> routines to generate HIG-compliant (I hope) error messages from GnomeVFS
> errors for File->Open, File->Save, and a Save before Closing
> confirmation dialog.

These seem quite nice.  As previously discussed my gut reaction is
that they belong in libgsf, failing that possibly in libgoffice.
Information gleaned from their design could feed back into the error
handling there.

> There's a bunch of other stuff as well.  All of this ought to be spun
> off into some kind of shared library, I suppose.

We'll need to monitor what goes into libgoffice carefully to help
ensure that it doesn't turn into a vast dumping ground.  So far its
maintained its simplicity.  As a urologist friend used to say
    'drop your drawers and put your problem where I can see it'
Lets go through on a case by case basis and hash out what makes
sense.  The more code we can share, the more polished our apps can
be.

Do we need a quorum of some sort before smearing conglomerate with
sacred gnome droppings ?