Re: Reflecting on LUDEX

From: Alan Horkan (horkana_at_maths.tcd.ie)
Date: Thu Apr 22 2004 - 13:52:37 EDT

  • Next message: E. A. Zen: "Re: AbiWord in the Media!"

    On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Omer Zak wrote:

    > Subject: Re: Reflecting on LUDEX

    > On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
    >
    > > There are, however, two areas in which not only we can compete with
    > > OpenOffice, but where we are without competition.

    It is definately difficult to get users who have tried and disliked
    abiword to try it again, plenty of people are still annoyed at the long
    fixed font nastiness.

    > A third area - quick startup time. When trying to start an OpenOffice
    > application, it takes long time to start. AbiWord starts quickly.

    even quicker than most people realise, we should almost have a "tip of the
    day" feature just to tell users they can speed up Abiword by disabling the
    splash screen (and turing off any plugins that they are not using).

    > I agree that AbiWord must be made very stable, and that it should be
    > modularized (if Linux kernel can be modular, why can't AbiWord be?).

    In the past I took great pleasure in cramming abiword for Windows (just
    the EXE nothing else) on to a single floppy disk after compressing it with
    UPX. (Question, is the linux binary of Abiword relocatable? it is
    something I have seen the autopackage project mention but I cannot
    remember if it has happened here yet)

    Abiword is already very modular and has been for a long time.

    As part of 2.0 most of the non-essential import and export plugins were
    rolled out into seperate modules, but as far as I remember this was only
    some build magic revealing the modularity that already existed.

    The downside of this is that without really thinking about it
    distributions take the path of least resistance and leave out many of
    the good plugins that they really should include (and then again Debian
    went for overkill and inlcuded everything, even the ImageMagik plugin
    which was too much and really hurt startup time) or users are not aware
    of the extras.

    It is hard to make it clear to users and developers that what Abiword
    releases by defualt is not the smallest or largest version of Abiword.
    It would be hassle and be confusing to provide an even wider variety of
    builds such as a mini-build and an almost everything build.

    Collaboration with Scribus sounds great, and I expect would be easier if
    they were using also using libgsf if they wanted to go a bit further than
    interoperability and go for some code reuse.

    Thanks for telling us about LUDEX, I would have loved to have gone, maybe
    next time if I'm lucky.

    Sincerely

      Alan



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu Apr 22 2004 - 13:55:18 EDT