Re: defining GNOME Office for developers

[Robert Staudinger <robsta stereolyzer net>]

Ok, the last mail was very vague.
Here i'm trying to set some topics out for discussion, what GO is/should
be/will be for developers.

Please note that the points mentioned are mostly based on lurking on
mailing lists for some time, supplemented by some wild guesses and, of
course, personal opinions. Furthermore should this only be a suggestion
which topics do discuss and maybe define later on, it's not the actual
definition yet! Some things might sound a bit ridiculous, given that GO
now seems to consist of Abiword, Gnumeric and GDA (Divifund proposed),
but GO might become bigger once.

SCOPE
- Is there a common sense of moving GO beyond being an informal 
  communication platform?
- Is GO in need for more applications? Planner, inkscape ... come to 
  mind.
- Should we maybe apply some kind of tagging (core, personal, 
  professional, ...) to communicate target audience?
  Candidates would IMHO be:
  core:         Abiword, Gnumeric
  personal:     Divifund, if included
  professional: Planner maybe?
- ...

RELATION TO GNOME AND GNOME'S POLICIES
- GNOME enforces very strict adherence to the HIG for proposed modules. 
  Are we as strict? Would the addition of a text entry to the file 
  selector disqualify an application from inclusion? See inkscape:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=5207617&forum_id=36054
- Release cycle
- ...

LIBRARIES
- Which useful libraries originate in one of the GO apps, what can they 
  do, what is planned for the future. (GDA, enchant, libgsf, 
  libgnomeoffice)
- What components does GO provide? (e.g. abi's bonobo component)
- Is an application forced to use certain libraries? GTK+ being pretty 
  obvious, but what about Glade? Can a non-glade app become part of GO?

FILE FORMATS
- Encourage interop with GO native file formats? (see Divifund)
- Policy related to Microsoft and ooo file formats?
- Role of svg?

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
- We now have apps written in c, c++. 
- Divifund (python) is proposed, general attitude towards scripting 
  languages?
- Connection to gnome-language-bindings project, which guarantees the 
  constant quality of a binding?

PACKAGING, INSTALLING
- Of course it's easiest to leave this to distributions, but
- Linux: do we think that evaluating and eventually adopting autopackage
  (http://autopackage.org) would make distribution easier?
- Win32: interest has been mentioned in teaming up with other gtk-based 
  win32 apps to share gtk installations.

I'm looking forward to hear your opinions!
Thanks, 
Rob

Am Mit, den 04.08.2004 schrieb Robert Staudinger um 0:10:
> Hello, 
> 
> from browsing inkscape's mail archives, especially the thread titled
> "GNOME HIG" at
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=5232958&forum_id=36054
> i got the impression that there might be some uncertainty amongst people
> (developers) concerning what GO is and what it might become. It seemed
> to me that there's some reservation because of fears not to "sell their
> soul (application)" and being forced to use certain libraries and being
> obliged to restrictions. One point mentioned was cross platform ness.
> 
> Maybe it would be helpful if we could collect information what being
> part of GO means for developers, some sort of a manifesto even? This
> could be published on the upcoming website and help to avoid
> misinformation and uncertainty. 
> 
> What do you think?
> Rob
> 
> 
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