Re: Moving some plugins back into the main tree?

On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, J.M. Maurer wrote:

> Subject: Re: Moving some plugins back into the main tree?

I'm slightly surprised you asked the question. Bundling and being as
functional as possible by default has some tradeoffs but on balance I
think applications that do more right "out of the box" are much more
likely to impress users. (There have been far too many situations where
I've had to accept the defaults, and had no option to install additional
software or plugins. Not so much with abiword but with other programs
too.)

The minor only concern is that a few groups like PortableAbiword might
desire a smaller minimal version of abiword but I would hope they would
stand up and say so (especially since it was and probably still would be
possible to cram abiword (without dictionaries) on a single floppy disk if
you really wanted to).

> > If we decide to do this, it can be done on a case-by-case basis. I'd
> > initially only suggest moving imp/exp plugins that:
> >
> > *) Are fairly robust/mature
> > *) Don't have any external dependencies that AbiWord doesn't already
> > have
> > *) And are commonly used
> >
> > I think that this amounts to:
> >
> > *) OpenDocument

w00t! I expect lots of support for OpenDocument

> > *) DocBook

Not quite sure why this is so important just yet but perhaps the migration
of our documentation to Docbook is further along than I realised.

> > with the possibility of:
> >
> > *) WML
> > *) XSL-FO
> > *) OpenWriter
> > *) StarWriter
>
> XSL-FO: yes, rest: "don't care" ;)

I agree but again I am left wondering how you are putting XSL-FO to use
and I figure I must be missing a trick if it is really useful enough to be
included by default.

I'd like to see the LaTeX plugin reincluded by default but if it is not
popular enough I'd understand leaving it out by default.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/alanhorkan
http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com/
Received on Thu Jan 4 15:48:06 2007