Re: Making Conglomerate part of Gnome Office

[Dave Malcolm <david davemalcolm demon co uk>]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 03:01, Martin Sevior wrote:
> 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.

This all sounds excellent; I'm grabbing the latest CVS AbiWord and
Gnumeric as I write!

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

Yes, I'm keeping an eye on this.

> 
> 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
> >