Re: Making Conglomerate part of Gnome Office

[Martin Sevior <msevior seviorpc ph unimelb edu au>]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 12:38, Dave Malcolm wrote:
> I'm the lead programmer/maintainer of Conglomerate, a free (as in GPL)
> user-friendly XML editor based on GNOME technologies; see
> http://www.conglomerate.org
> 
> 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 :-)
> 

Hi Dave!
        yes I remember those Pubs and I still think this is a good idea
too. In fact I was thinking about Conglomerate in the GNOME-Office suite
for a few days.

AbiWord and Gnumeric want to try to get another stable release in about
6 months in time for GNOME-2.6. I think it would be good for
Conglomerate to aim for it's first stable release in about the same
time-frame.

In fact aiming for time based stable releases in-synch with GNOME would
probably be a good long term goal anyway.

> At the least, please can Conglomerate appear on this page:
> http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/
> 
> Conglomerate isn't yet stable/fast enough for production use, and might
> not yet be ready for integration into your release schedules.
> 
> 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.  The dialogs attempt to spot special-cases, and
> present genuinely useful information, rather than merely convert an
> error code into a text string.  Here are some screenshots:
http://www.conglomerate.org/shots/file_open_error.png
http://www.conglomerate.org/shots/file_save_error.png
http://www.conglomerate.org/shots/file_save_confirm.png

Those are nice! AbiWord has something similar already for the last one.
But this does raise the issue of libgoffice for shared stuff which was
something we planned to look at post GNOME-Office-1.0. There are various
bits I'd like to see from Gnumeric in there (the code for shading cells
in particular). AbiWord has an uber cool insert table widget which might
be useful for Conglomerate, Mergeant and Evolution. Plus Dom will
shortly start on his generic grammar/auto-completion/auto-correction
framework which would useful to Conglomerate.

GTK-MathView have also just announced a MATHML bonobo widget which would
be useful to AbiWord and maybe Conglomerate.

I guess we should look at putting this library together somehow.

Cheers

Martin

> 
> 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.
> 
> Thoughts?  Flames?
> 
> [cc-ed to the conglomerate list, hopefully everyone there agrees that
> this is a good idea]
> 
> David Malcolm
> 
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