KOffice 2.0 proposal

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Hi,

Nobody seems to know how far we are from releasability, exactly, so we did an 
irc audit of KWord for release readiness today 
(http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Kword_audit). The outcome was pretty 
horrifying: KWord really is not even close to release readiness. In seventy 
minutes of basic usage so many problems surfaced, some of which point to 
basic design issues that we feel a KWord 2.0 release is many months away.

The same holds, more or less, for many KOffice components. Kivio is in a worse 
state, but at least it hasn't wandered down the path to perdution quite so 
far. Krita 2 has good bits, but there are many problems still. And we've gone 
long enough between releases that the development enthusiasm is waning. 

This lead to a bit of discussion on the best way forward for a KOffice 2.0 
release not too far away from the KDE 4.1 release.

Our (that is, Thorsten, Boudewijn, Casper, Dipesh) proposal is to start 
concentrating not on KWord, but on KPresenter. We've got the following 
reasons:

* Almost everything done for kpresenter is useful for the rest of KOffice: 
table shape, text shape, cut & paste, ODF framework, drawing tools, image 
shape.
* KPresenter is something people use a lot, or at least, want to use a lot. 
Our conferencing globe-trotters have often told me that they really need a 
KDE presentation tool as smooth as Keynote and as dependable as Powerpoint.

So, the initial KOffice 2.0 release would contain:

* KPresenter
* KSpread (not much development recently, but in a pretty good shape)
* KChart (lots of recent work, in a pretty good shape)

Perhaps:

* KPlato (Dag? We're not quite able to assess the readiness of KPlato)
* Karbon (Jan, Rob? Lots of recent work, in a pretty good shape -- but there 
are still new features being added, and focussing on kpresenter will also 
take a lot of flake work, tying up Jan)

Whether Krita gets released is right now a moot question. KWord and Kivio are 
not ready at all. KFormula is as far as I can tell still in the middle of a 
reworking. Jaroslaw -- what's the state of Kexi? I remember you being 
doubtful & focussing on pim?

So, how about it?

(Btw, I haven't had a reply yet from any of the usability groups I've 
approached.)
-- 
Boudewijn Rempt 
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi