Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 25, 2004 01:21 PM
At the maintainer of an unreleased KOffice app -- Krita -- I can say why _I_ don't want to work on OpenOffice. It's too big to even get started on. It's not based on any standard GUI library
For the sake of fairness, I should point out that this is because the OOo codebase predates any of the cross-platform toolkits that exist today.
Now that they exist, and OOo is open source, we are trying to move towards using those toolkits. On version 2.0 OOo will use Gtk on GNU/Linux and there will probably be a Qt version later on as well.
It contains a small set of components that is apparently not really extensible
OOo is actually fairly extensible. But it is also big and overwhelming. We are trying to improve this.
when was the last new app added to the suite?
What new app do you think we need? We need new functionality, and each version brings something. 1.1.0 brought PDF and Flash export, 1.1.1 brought DictOOo, 1.1.2 brought FontOOo.
This, algthough the bulk of the work has gone into improving what we currently have: MS Office compatibility, refactoring the GUI, reducing bloat (each version is faster than the previous one), etc.
The code has a history that spans many more years than KOffice, and many more developers, which adds up to complexity.
True that. OOo is bigger than the Linux Kernel.
No, I want to work on something that's small enough to understand, compartmented enough not to annoy my neighbour coder, open enough to add something new to and that uses something standard enough that I don't have to start with the gui basics.
OOo is comparmented and open. But I hear you about the "small enough" and "standard enough".
As for the smallness thing, we are creating a scripting framework which will make it much easier to add functionality without having to learn the internals.
I'm happy hacking Krita, and no amount of calls to cease and desist will make me do so<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-).
Oh well... we certainly could have used another coder.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
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Re:OpenOffice.org
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 25, 2004 01:21 PMFor the sake of fairness, I should point out that this is because the OOo codebase predates any of the cross-platform toolkits that exist today.
Now that they exist, and OOo is open source, we are trying to move towards using those toolkits. On version 2.0 OOo will use Gtk on GNU/Linux and there will probably be a Qt version later on as well.
It contains a small set of components that is apparently not really extensible
OOo is actually fairly extensible. But it is also big and overwhelming. We are trying to improve this.
when was the last new app added to the suite?
What new app do you think we need? We need new functionality, and each version brings something. 1.1.0 brought PDF and Flash export, 1.1.1 brought DictOOo, 1.1.2 brought FontOOo.
This, algthough the bulk of the work has gone into improving what we currently have: MS Office compatibility, refactoring the GUI, reducing bloat (each version is faster than the previous one), etc.
The code has a history that spans many more years than KOffice, and many more developers, which adds up to complexity.
True that. OOo is bigger than the Linux Kernel.
No, I want to work on something that's small enough to understand, compartmented enough not to annoy my neighbour coder, open enough to add something new to and that uses something standard enough that I don't have to start with the gui basics.
OOo is comparmented and open. But I hear you about the "small enough" and "standard enough".
As for the smallness thing, we are creating a scripting framework which will make it much easier to add functionality without having to learn the internals.
I'm happy hacking Krita, and no amount of calls to cease and desist will make me do so<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-).
Oh well... we certainly could have used another coder.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
Cheers,
Daniel.
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