Re: Gnumeric for commercial use

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 07:15:26PM -0400, Daniel Nilsson wrote:
> We are a software development company for the Signal Integrity 
> business that are considering using gnumeric as a report tool for
> the spreadsheet generated bu our software. I see several levels of
> integration here, starting with displaying .xls files as a 
> standalone tool we could possibly end up generating native .gnumeric
> files with extensions and integrate gnumeric using CORBA. However,
> I have some basic questions:
All of those seem reasonable.  There is active work being done to
make Gnumeric usable as a Bonobo Control & Embeddable.  This should
should simplify some things.  The pure CORBA interface is still in
proof of concept stage, as are the python scripting capabilities.
Although we support creating spreadsheet functions in python, perl,
and guile scriptability is another issue.  We are not going to
choose an api or an object model for controlling Gnumeric until after
1.0.  It is too important to do poorly, and too hard to chance once
it has been selected.
 
> 1. We can't make predictions where out software will be installed. 
> We'd like to ship gnumeric as part of the tool, so the location
> of gnumeric and the libraries might differ. Is that a problem that
> can be solved or is the root directory if gnome hardcoded in 
> gnumeric and/or it's libraries ? Forcing our customers to install
> gnome might not be an acceptable solution.
Gnumeric is mostly self contained.  We have been very careful about
versioning and path control.  However, you will certainly need
several of the libraries that are part of the gnome development
platform.  These libraries have support files that need to be
installed.  So although there is no requirement that the gnome-panel
be installed, you will need oaf and its config files.  There is a
gray area with respect to the help browser.  You may need to do some
work there to get things to work without nautilus.

> 2. I have compiled and installed Gnumeric on our development system,
> Solaris 2.7 (32-bit). I ran into problem running the application 
> on a Sun Blade100 (Solaris 8) with the Xserver in 8-bit mode. I had 
> to switch to 24-bit mode to make it work. This was mentioned on
> one of the mailing-lists as a problem quite a while ago, however
> the same problem seems to exist on the latest gnome libraries. Is
> there work beeing done to solve this ?
I would be receptive to a patch, but lacking access to that
configuration we can not test it.

> 3. The excel.so module doesn't work :-( (showstopper right now). ld.so.1
> complains about relocation errors. I think it's libiconv that it can't
> find (the message is to long for the screen, I can't see the end of
> the message). Though libiconv.so is in /usr/local/liv/libiconv.so and 
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH does include /usr/local/lib. This is what things look
> like:
hmm this sounds similar to a report from the freebsd folk.  you may
need to manually include -liconv when linking gnumeric.

We'd certainly welcome any testing or contribution you can make.
    Jody