Hi Yegor, sorry for the late reply, I was too busy for a well-thought answer.
Yegor Jbanov wrote: > I am going to try to be constructive. First, let's see if we can > simplify the problem statement. I will try to do that by asking two > questions: > > 1. If OpenOffice.org had a sibling project called "OpenOffice.org > Server", what features would it have to provide to be useful? I think the goal should be that no UI components should be necessary to run it. Without going too much into details, just separating core and UI wouldn't be enough, we also must solve the problem that some wanted features (e.g. format conversion) will need an output device as they require layouting. Both is solvable with evolutionary code changes, but admittedly a lot of them. No reason to restart from scratch. > 2. How big an effort would it take to accomplish such a project? That's hard to estimate, even finding a proper estimation could last days and weeks. My guesstimate is 3-12 months, depending on the number of developers working on it. But I may be wrong here because my knowledge about Calc and Impress is limited. > I can answer the first question from my point of view. I am sure > others will find other features that they would want to have. First of > all, I would like to be able to deploy the Server on a machine that > has no windowing system. Second, it would be nice to have > multi-language support (Java, C++, Python, etc), possibly through UNO. > ODF Toolkit, filters and type detection should be there of course. I > suppose dictionaries and spell checker also belong there. No doubt > there is more. That's possible already, but only with the notorious "headless hack", as you wrote yourself. So the features alone don't require any changes, but of course the architecture. > The second question is the hardest and I guess it's the core > developers who can give a more accurate answer. I would like to note > that the need for a "server" component has been recognized a long time > ago and it was partially addressed. However, the chosen approach was a > hack and it is still a hack. Connecting to a headless GUI application > through sockets/pipes is not a solution. You are right, it never was meant to be anything else than a stopgap solution. But as we all know, stopgap solutions often tend to be very durable... > It is an approach you keep > secretly for those times when it is desperately necessary, but you > don't mention it a lot in order not to embarrass yourself. Too much of > that GUI nature is leaking through the API. It is not stable. It is > full of memory-leaks. While I agree that the "headless hack" is ugly, it is not necessarily the root cause for instability and memory leaks in the current release. I think the superfluous UI code executed in server mode even adds less to that than the needed core code. You are right from a theoretical POV: superfluous code never can be good. So back to the facts. As I wrote somewhere else, in Writer we have thought about and worked on refactoring for quite some time. I already have an idea how to get rid of most of the high level UI code. There are still some challenging plaitings to solve, but I like challenges. :-) If you are asking me if there will happen something in the near future: I can't answer that. The interesting point is how to find the right balance between the different interests: - we always must keep pace with the ODF proceedings and still have to iron out some bugs in our current ODF support (this is vital for OOo and out of any discussion) - some users want us to implement features they are asking for, to some extent since quite some time - some users want us to fix the bugs that annoy them, also partly since quite some time - some users ask for performance improvements - others (mainly developers of course) ask for better modularization. My personal POV is that it's time to consider the two latter points stronger than in the last two major releases. But that's only me. I hope that the next weeks and months will show us where we will be heading to in the 3.x releases. Regards, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
