NeoJ and OOo : Is this a good analogy?

[JimWG]

Greetings:

So that I can get a better handle on the role of NeoOffice's construction to better direct my feature requests and bug-fix alerts, would it be stretching to say that GM builds a car's motor and chassis and body and NeoOffice is the custom body shop that builds a new body into your dream wheels. Now, is there any deeper "tinkering" than that by the body shop into the motor or chassis, say like allowing to save backups in a different format and folder or using Nisus Theasurus or third party dictionaries under Services.(hint-hint!), or is it mostly a body-only shop?

Thanks!

James Greenidge

[OPENSTEP]

Hmm...I think in that analogy we'd mostly be only the "body shop" kind of thing right now. Some of the deeper changes (like integrating with Services, GUI rearrangement/redesign, adding AppleScript support, etc.) are quite involved from an engineering perspective and I'm not sure we can do them in either project.

When it comes down to it, getting OOo to run on Mac OS X is kind of like trying to bang a square peg into a round hole. It wasn't programmed on a Mac or with consideration for Macs in mind. Since it's using essentially no Mac technologies in the bulk of its code it makes these kinds of Mac-specific enhancements all the more difficult.

Extending the above analogy, think of it more of a melted car where the body and the engine have been fused together. That's kind of more like the underlying code of OOo. A lot of things are intermingled and have dependencies on each other. It just makes doing work harder

ed

[Guest]

Perhaps a better analogy would be that GM builds a car that runs on gasoline and a third-party modifies the car so that it runs on a hydrogen fuel cell.