Re: Why Inkscape is not in GNOME-Office??

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sun, Aug 08, 2004 at 12:39:55PM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > >  Why Inkscape is not in GNOME-Office??
> >
> > It has not asked to be part of gnome office.
> >
> > We can evaluate it on it's
> > 1) merits
> > 2) use of gnome office technologies
> > 3) whether a drawing app is office-related or art-related
> >
> 
> The one concern that a few of us have is that we're uncertain about the
> extra dependencies that would be added if we were required to adopt a
> bunch of GNOME Office libraries.

Lets be very clear here.  There is no 'require' about any of this.
I see two reasons to form a suite rather than contining as distinct
projects.
    1) The marketing meme that it must be a suite
    2) Decreasing the development burden and improving quality of
       common features.
The only reason to adopt libgsf or the upcoming libgoffice would be
to make lives easier.

> Now, it's likely the GNOME Office libs have no problems, but we just
> haven't really analyzed them in detail yet so we don't know.
libgsf-1 has been api stable for a long time and should be ready for
discussion.  libgoffice is still in a state of flux and there is no
point in discussing it's use beyond making feature requests.

> concern is less about the particular libs and more about the process -
> being given a list of required libs that must be added to Inkscape in
> order for it to be acceptable as a GNOME Office application leaves some
> distaste in the mouth.

I hope I've aleviated those concerns.  The goal with goffice is to
allow all of us, as a group to polish our feature set with less
effort.
eg
    Gnumeric has File -> SendTo support that should expand to
    properly handle more mailers and better handle different
    encodings.  Why write this twice ?

    Abiword had some nice ideas for a font name combo box

    etc..

If the tools are useful use them, if not don't.  There are valid
reasons to consider inkscape for inclusion without using the
libraries.  My point was that using and contributing to the
development of these sorts of shared tools would improve
interoperatbility and consistency, and hence make a stronger case
for apps to be included.