On Mon, Feb 09, 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Re: Participating in the Open Office development effort": > But that's precisely the problem with OpenOffice - to do almost anything > with it, you have to compile the whole !*$(@!# thing (excuse my french).
But as I said, I think this is not entirely true. I gave Hspell as an example - the work we did on Hspell was done entirely outside OpenOffice, and even though it took the OpenOffice guys a lot of time to integrate Hspell into OpenOffice, our work nevertheless saved them a lot of time (as much as 6 man months, the approximate amount of time we invested in Hspell), and more importantly: Hebrew spell-checking most likely would NOT be available in the Hebrew openoffice if it weren't for our work. It wasn't in the original plan (as far as I know), and I heard from other sources (not OpenOffice people) that creating a Hebrew spell-checker is sometimes estimated to take 6 man years. We made the project feasable by doing it in a tenth of the time. I also gave the example of Hebrew translation. Translating strings might require access to the source's strings and some scripts to manage them (I assume the OO people, in Israel or Germany, already have those things) but doesn't require compilation! A bunch of people without 6 months on their hands to learn to compile could do such translations, which if I remember correctly was one of the major features of this Hebrew release, and will take a lot of continued work on the next releases. Translation of the help files, which was completely absent from this release, also doesn't require any compilation of source code - just some programs/ scripts/whatever for managing those files. I believe that Shoshana Forbes already started working on this direction. Working on Culmus (or other) fonts to meet OpenOffice's strict requirements also doesn't need compilation of the code (maybe looking at it, but not compilation). So if someone really wants to help OpenOffice without compiling it even once, it's possible. And I gave a few ideas how. And, of course, if you do want to patch the OpenOffice code yourself, then TK/OS latest offer is very welcome. But be warned, it won't be easy. If a program takes 10 hours to smoothly compile, it takes much more than 10 hours to learn (and that's an understatement...) -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Feb 9 2004, 17 Shevat 5764 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-790466, ICQ 13349191 |May you live as long as you want - and http://nadav.harel.org.il |never want as long as you live. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
