Re: Moving some plugins back into the main tree?

On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 18:01 -0500, Dominic Lachowicz wrote:
> Now that libgsf is a requirement and some of our import/export plugins
> are getting both more popular and more robust (eg. OpenDocument), I
> was wondering if we might consider moving some of the plugins back
> into the main tree. I'm concerned that we're making life more
> difficult for our users than it needs to be.
>
> 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
> *) DocBook
> *) The Win32 native graphics plugin
>
> with the possibility of:
>
> *) WML
> *) XSL-FO
> *) OpenWriter
> *) StarWriter
>
> This can also be seen as a packaging issue. If (for example) the ODF
> plugin was always distributed in the installers, I might not consider
> this to be an issue. It wouldn't matter if it was a plugin or builtin,
> so long as it was installed.
>
> What do ya'll think?
>
> -Dom

I think OpenDocument should definitely be in. To be honestly I was
surprised to find out that it was still a plugin and not in included in
Abiword itself.

DocBook, WML and XSL-FO are markup languages if I'm correct. I don't
understand at all why anyone would want to use markup languages inside a
word processor like Abiword?

IMO a word processor like Abiword is overkill and totally impractical
for markup languages. When I'm editing DocBook for Abiword's
documentation I'm doing it in gedit, because that gives me syntax
highlighting, line numbers and so on. Abiword doesn't, and has features
for changing layout of text which are useless when I'm editing markup
languages.

Don't know what OpenWriter is, but StarWriter is legacy now that
StarOffice uses OpenDocument. If it's legacy and unlikely to be used,
just keep it in the plugins.

I think the main tree should only contain the following: Abiword's file
format, OpenDocument, MS Office file format, plain text, PDF (save only)
and RTF. All markup languages and legacy office suite file formats are
probably useless for the majority of users, so I'd suggest you'd keep
them in in the plugins.

Off-topic, but related to file formats: the Abiword file format is split
into normal (.abw), template (.awt), gzip compressed (.zabw) and bzip
compressed (.bzabw). Why 3 differrent formats? If OpenDocument files use
compression by default, why can't Abiword do the same for .abw and
dump .zabw and .bzabw?
Received on Thu Jan 4 20:00:22 2007