Using Sheets as a library

[Philip Van Hoof]

Hi guys,

For the purpose of a custom made and specialized Qt application will
need to adapt the CMakeFile.txt of Sheets in such a way that the
non-installed calligrasheetscommon_LIB gets installed and that its
header files will become available.

Right now for demo purposes to and learn whether or not it would be
doable what I had in mind for this Qt application, I use a link
commandline like this:

/usr/bin/c++   -g -Wall -g    MainWindow.o MySheetItem.o  -o showsheet_qt - \
	-lKDToolsGui -lQtGui -lQtCore -lQtOpenGL -Wl,-Bstatic -lQtUiTools -Wl,-Bdynamic \
	-lQtNetwork -lKDUpdater -lKDUnitTest -lQtXml -lQtSvg -lQtWebKit -lphonon \
	-lQtGui -lQtCore -lQtOpenGL \
	/home/pvanhoof/repos/calligra/calligra-2.4.3/obj-i486-linux-gnu/lib/libcalligrasheetscommon.so \
	/home/pvanhoof/repos/calligra/calligra-2.4.3/obj-i486-linux-gnu/lib/libkomain.so.9.0.0 \
	/home/pvanhoof/repos/calligra/calligra-2.4.3/obj-i486-linux-gnu/lib/libflake.so.9.0.0 \
	/usr/lib/libkdecore.so.5 \
	/home/pvanhoof/repos/calligra/calligra-2.4.3/obj-i486-linux-gnu/lib/libcalligrasheetsodf.so.9.0.0 

This works, illustrating that my plan to use CanvasItem in my qt
application will 'just work' (awesome).

My question is whether the Calligra community would be interested in my
patches for CMakeFile.txt files of Calligra and whether Calligra in
general would be interested in transforming from a set of office suite
application to a set of libraries and components that can be used to
build office-like applications.

In particular for spreadsheets there is a rather big interested. There
are both commercial and open source libraries like LibXL, libxls and
xlreader, xlslib that illustrate this.

The Sheets library of Calligra goes even further that for example the
commercial LibXL and will on top of parsing the layout also render it
with Qt as a QGraphicsItem (The CanvasItem in Sheets does this).

Because it is a Qt library and because it is a QGraphicsItem, and not a
QWidget which would have required the use of QGraphicsProxyWidget, it
makes it perfect for reuse in other applications in my opinion.

I also noticed that all the files under sheets/ are annotated at the top
for the LGPL copyright. I saw two copyrights in the Calligra main
directory, COPYING and COPYING.LIB, can I assume that what falls under
sheets is LGPL? This is important for my application and I think for
making it more easy to reuse sheets/ as a library too.

These files have the GNU General Public License instead of the GNU
Library General Public License. Will I have to rewrite the files or is
the Calligra team AND are the original authors OK with assuming they
were wrongly annotated as LGPL? In that case, can I provide a patch that
changes the license for the files from GPL to LGPL? Should I await an OK
from every author of all the files?

pvanhoof at lors:~/repos/kde4/calligra/sheets$ grep "GNU General" * -R |
cut -d ":" -f -1 | sort | uniq
dialogs/ConsolidateDetailsWidget.ui
dialogs/ConsolidateWidget.ui
dialogs/GoalSeekWidget.ui
dialogs/SortDetailsWidget.ui
dialogs/SortWidget.ui
dialogs/SpecialPasteWidget.ui
dialogs/SubtotalsDetailsWidget.ui
tests/BenchmarkRTree.cpp
tests/BenchmarkRTree.h
pvanhoof at lors:~/repos/kde4/calligra/sheets$ 


pvanhoof at lors:~/repos/kde4/calligra/sheets$ for a in `grep "GNU General" * -R | cut -d ":" -f -1 | sort | uniq` ; do grep Copyright $a ; doneCopyright 2010 Stefan Nikolaus <stefan.nikolaus at kdemail.net>
Copyright 2010 Stefan Nikolaus <stefan.nikolaus at kdemail.net>
Copyright 2009 Stefan Nikolaus <stefan.nikolaus at kdemail.net>
Copyright 2010 Stefan Nikolaus <stefan.nikolaus at kdemail.net>
Copyright 2010 Stefan Nikolaus <stefan.nikolaus at kdemail.net>
Copyright (C) 2006 Stefan Nikolaus <stefan.nikolaus at kdemail.net>
Copyright 2010 Stefan Nikolaus <stefan.nikolaus at kdemail.net>
   Copyright (C) 2006 Stefan Nikolaus <stefan.nikolaus at kdemail.net>
   Copyright (C) 2006 Stefan Nikolaus <stefan.nikolaus at kdemail.net>
   Copyright (C) 2010 Marijn Kruisselbrink <mkruisselbrink at kde.org>
pvanhoof at lors:~/repos/kde4/calligra/sheets$


Kind regards,

Philip


-- 


Philip Van Hoof
Software developer
Codeminded BVBA - http://codeminded.be