fedora-devel-list Digest, Vol 12, Issue 104

[John Thacker]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 01:18:01PM +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
> 
> The AbiWord community is as vibrant as ever. We committed over 300,000
> LOC of changes to the code base over 14 months to produce AbiWord-2.2.
> We implemented all sorts of cool stuff that neither MS Word or OOo has.
> We implemented features that make the users job of creating documents
> easier and more fun. We want that code to be seen and used and
> appreciated by as many people as possible. We're in a position to be
> widely deployed across heterogenic communities like Universities and
> Schools since we have Windows, Mac and Linux clients. 

I otherwise like the program, but it's an incredible PIA for me to use
because of its absolutely horrible CJK support.  So I essentially never
use it, even though a few years ago Japanese support (on Linux) went from 
"completely unavailable" to "laughably horrible."  OOo has very nice,
mature, professional CJK features.

http://bugzilla.abisource.com/buglist.cgi?keywords=cjk

Now I see that someone made it "not totally suck" on MacOSX recently,
so maybe there's hope yet for AbiWord.

> I bought into the idea of Fedora as a community project with real
> support for grass roots developers and users. What I see are corporate
> backed projects pushing the grass roots projects out. I also see these
> projects pushing all the fun stuff out too. 

Of course, being in Extras is supposed to be the community project part
with grassroots support.  Now of course we want to make sure that it
appears in Extras and that Extras is easy to find (such as from the website),
but in the future, Extras is to be everything that is community based, which 
outside people can easily add to, whereas Core is a limited set of necessary
things that only RedHat people add to.  In the long run, a vibrant and
useful Extras is better than a situation where nearly everything is in
Core and dependent on RedHat employees updating them if this is to be a real 
community project.

John Thacker
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