5 Mar 2005 wlach   » (Master)

WriterPerfect (a WordPerfect filter for OpenOffice, based on libwpd 0.8.0) has finally been merged into the OOo 2.0 release branch. I guess that makes it something like two and a half years since I made the original announcement that I had developed this functionality. Many people deserve credit for this milestone (myself included), but I would like to personally thank Fridrich Strba for ironing out the many final details and doing the legwork of merging the CWS (child workspace: think inverted branch) into the main tree. In production software, the devil is always in the details, and I don't think we would have gotten to this level of quality and integration without Fridrich's persistence.

Overall, I'm feeling pretty conflicted about OpenOffice these days. On the one hand, it's pretty exciting to see your work have such a big impact: I have no doubt that tens of thousands of people have used our WP filter by now. On the other, the amount of work that was required to integrate such a simple feature is really rather depressing. In my analysis, it's pretty much impossible to meaningfully contribute to OpenOffice without dedicating huge amounts of time to the task (e.g.: 20 hours a week or more). The codebase is so large and its idioms so non-standard (CWS, UNO, dmake, ..) that anything less just isn't going to cut it.

I have every intention of continuing to help maintain libwpd, but I have decided that any other future work on office suites is going to be devoted to Abiword and Gnome Office, where I actually stand a chance of making a constructive difference without throwing away all my free time.

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