Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

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

On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> 
> I love Gnumeric Jody, I really do, but when there are way too many
> features that people need if we are hoping to deploy in large
> environments.  
> 
> One very big feature of OpenOffice is the fact that you get the whole
> combo, and the whole combo right now is integrated.  Right now our
> AbiWord, and Gnumeric are far from having the kind of integration that
> OpenOffice has.
> 

This will certainly change if we can ever get AbiWord 1.0 out the door. We
have a very clean seperation between GUI and backend which should make it
easy to bonobo-ize and turn into a web-service. AbiWord is the only unix
application that I know of where you can drag and drop icons from place to
place on the toolbars because of this seperation.

In any case having spent a lot of time examining MS Word over the last two
years there is no feature in that program I'm scared of. Having OO as a
resource to raid code from just makes it easier.

Finally I think we should forget the great opportunity we (Gnome) have
over the next year or two to grab a place on small GUI applications. WinCE
(or whatever it is called now) ships with pocket Word and Excell.
AbiWord/Gnumeric could fill the same role.

> I am not going to force anyone to do anything (last time I tried to
> force people, Slashdot discovered it, impeached me and demanded my
> resignation from whatever it was ;-), but maybe the OpenOffice code base
> is a better starting point to have a full office suite. 
> 


I'm not sure this is true. The OO hackers with around 50 full-time hackers
have spent the last 1.5 years just breaking the application up so that not
everything appears on the screen at once. 


 > > With luck, cross pollination between the projects will lift
all > > boats.  However, I think effort is better spent on extensions for
> > applications like Gnumeric which will be useful to OpenOffice as
> > they adopt GNOME technology.
> 

Well OO have AbiWord's spelling technology. We'd like some of their
in-house fonts :-) We may also re-use some of their import/export filters
and they could take a close look at the RTf they export.

Are OO going to adopt Gnome technology? Which? Apart from our spelling
code I have not heard of it yet.

> I agree that we should have more cross polination between these
> projects.  Someone should also seriously look at having OpenOffice use
> Gtk+ or at least use the gtk_draw api to get some theme similarity. 
> 

This kind of stuff is way beyond a beginning Gnome hacker. The OO guys
have to decide to do this themselves. At least they have to tell us they
want to do this. 

Cheers

Martin