GSoC07: keep dialogs in libabiword?

Hi Dom,

there's been an IRC discussion whether to keep abiword's dialogs in
libabiword yesterday. That'd of course be a deviation from my/our
current plan to focus on (see also [1])
(1) slim libabiword, but with migration path
(2) libabiword API

Martin and also Marc to some extent advocated keeping the dialogs, the
main argument was that the code/installation size decrease wasn't
worth the loss of functionality. Hub pointed out that if I thought it
was too hard to create or modify dialogs I should fix the framework
instead -- which would be of course a monster project and there's been
precedent of abandoned dialog migration efforts [2].

My counterarguments were that with a sane "model" interface it would
be comparatively easy to implement dialogs as a libabiword consumer
and that -- given an existing language binding -- dialogs could be
implemented in whatever language. Also there's a number of assumptions
connected to the way modal/non-modal dialogs work, that might lead to
problems for apps using multiple abiwidget instances. Finally one has
to start somewhere, I decided that this starting point/project should
be a nice standalone rich-text widget, and there's of course the
possibility to create a "libabiwidgets" at some later point in time.

So much for the context, it would be helpful if you would weight in as
my GSoC Mentor.

[1] http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/LibAbiwordDiet
[2] http://www.abisource.com/viewcvs/cgi/viewcvs.cgi/abi/src/af/xap/unix/xap_UnixWidget.{cpp,
h}

Thanks,
Rob
Received on Thu Apr 26 11:47:16 2007