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AbiWord Weekly News #119

AbiWord
AbiWord

Behold, my time traveling vrienden, it's the second to last week of November! To jog your memory, or tell you for the first time, the next Developers' Release is out! No, not 1.1.3, 1.1.2! Time traveling, remember.... Also, Marc's next secret project is out; Matthew's POW is doing great, but the more-the merrier, and Dom's begun the Mail Merge function.

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Re: AbiWord Weekly News #119

Only if you consider that they're taken entirely out of context.

What I had conveyed was that the pieces that AbiWord used most prominently were no longer a part of Gnome proper, but instead had been pushed to alternate places, such as GTK+. This becomes evident if one had read my previous or following lines in that IRC conversation. And it also becomes evident that I think that pushing the more useful bits of Gnome into something like GTK+ is an exceptionally good idea for both the user and developer alike. Consider:

GnomeDialog? GtkDialog

Gnome Stock? GtkStock

GdkPixbuf? Pushed up into GTK+ proper

Gnome/GTK toolbars, menus, or file selectors? Replacments are in Libegg, slated to someday be pushed up into GTK+

Which is not to mention the stylistic guidelines and overall user-interface improvements caused by these moves as well as documents such as the HIG. GTK+ has started to enfoce some UI behavior and consistency. This is a good thing.

GNOME is most certainly not dead, nor do I see it dying any time soon. If you honestly believe I think it's dead, could you explain to me why I've contributed to about 6 of its various projects and related projects within the past week or so?

That said, I'll start working on the GNOME2 port of AbiWord shortly. Not all of the useful things have been pushed up into GTK+, nor necessarily should they be. Expect to see GnomePrint support, libGDA access, Abi as a Bonobo control, and GConf support in the upcoming month or two. I even started some of this work prior to EAZen's weekly news, which was delightfully omitted.

The lack of GNOME2 work on AbiWord is more a reflection of my lack of time rather than a lack of interest. Other things have caught my attention lately - particularly OpenOffice support, a WMF GdkPixbuf plugin, GDA support in AbiWord, and mail merge to name a few. But also note that there are quite a few other developers both inside and outside the AbiWord project who could be working on a GNOME2 port as well and are not.

I do not and will not apologize for my statements being taken out of context or being exaggerated out of proportion by someone other than me. If my explanations or reasoning have been terse in the past, well, for that I do apologize and hope that this clears up my opinion on the matter.

Dom