Subject: Has development stopped?
cjm2@lewiston.com
Date: Sun Oct 22 2000 - 11:17:16 CDT
Hi:
I don't follow the progress of Abiword terribly closely because I'm not
a developer and have little to contribute. But I do use Abiword and
check the web site once or twice each month. There has been little
traffic on the mailing list and almost a month and a half since a weekly
newsletter.
I'm not complaining -- I'm concerned. Is Abiword development on hold?
If the release of Open Office is in any way related, then I can only
offer that Open Office will have to improve to be considered pre-alpha,
and that it cannot in any sense of the word be considered an office
suite at this time. In fact, it is not yet useable even as a word
processor only, because there isn't a means to print from the
application. It can really only be used as a text editor, because only
text files generated in the document can be printed, and then, only from
the command line. And because Open Office doesn't support the Star
Office "/net" switch during installation, it requires 170 MB of disk
space per user on a Unix/Linux system and does not appear to share
libraries during concurrent sessions.
Because the most often stated reason I have encountered for releasing
the Star Office source code has been to make it possible to split Star
Office into it's component pieces, and; because Star Writer now
(unofficially) holds the title of "World's Largest Broken Text Editor,"
then; Abiword remains as important today as it was last year. It may
well take years for the Open Office version of Star Writer to become
functional -- and it will continue to consume vast amounts of disk space
and ram when compared to Abiword.
Later,
Colin Mattoon
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