Subject: Re: How about some design specifications ?
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Mar 14 2000 - 02:37:18 CST
At 12:35 PM 3/9/00 PST, ArcadePreserv Center wrote:
>Obviously there are still some important features still missing in Abiword,
>without doubt this will be fixed in the future, but I have an idea of how it
>could be sped up.
>
>Often in comercial software development, you firstly do a design with
>specifications for each feature to be added, then you allocate people to
>solve the problems according to the specifications.
Thanks for the suggestion.
The major obstacle here -- in the proprietary or Open Source worlds -- is
that you have to get designers to sit down and hash out all the
specifications, and let others have fun writing the code and making it all
work. ;-) It's not always easy to get folks to sit down and hash out a
single complete design on paper, but when you can, it's worth it.
The closest we've managed to come to this so far are the weekly POWs, where
one of the AbiWord developers takes time to write up a project that they
won't personally be able to get to, but which is worth doing anyhow.
There are also a fair amount of intermittent design discussions which take
place on the list. Here again, we seem to continue to rely on the same
small-but-growing set of folks to work through various design details.
>I myself might be able to do some codings, but I dont feel I am the right
>person to do the major design on how for instance tables should be
>implemented, since it would require far more knowledge about abiword. Once
>the output of the tables function, i.e. how a table should be specified in
>the internal format and fileformat, someone could code a function that adds
>the table (perhaps in a very rudimentary way at first), then functions to
>edit the table and so on.
Tables are going to be a killer feature, but I'm afraid we'll first need to
work our way through some more basic design issues from our 1.0 feature set.
>Once the specs are there someone with little knowledge in abiword as such
>could more easily code the functions.
Yep. This approach has worked out quite well for importers and exporters,
so I expect that something similar can start happening once Keith & co get
the framework in place for calculated fields.
Paul
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