[SciPy-dev] Re: Open Office

[Mark Evans]

> This sounds really good but OO.o is a huge project.  I'm not sure it
> is going to be easy to simply join without investing a huge amount of
> time on this.  I also heard that building OO.o is a big pain.  I'm not
> sure what the others think of this.
> 
> cheers,
> prabhu

Those are fair points but don't you think joining OO would be easier
than constructing an entire chart API from scratch, all alone?

I don't think SciPy would have to build all of OO, just the UNO
interface layer.  Someone has already done a Python wrapper for UNO.
UNO components are like COM components (and in fact there exists a
COM/UNO bridge).

Regarding building OO I think some pain is natural with a 6.7 million
line cross-platform package, although these comments may invalidate
some previous criticisms --

http://udk.openoffice.org/common/man/uno.html

"StarOffice mainly uses the C++ -in-process functionality of UNO.
Before UNO, the StarOffice development suffered very much from
incompatible changes (e.g., adding a new virtual method or a new
member to a class) in one of the base libraries. This forced a
complete rebuild of the product, which roughly consumed 2 days and was
done only once a week. These incompatible updates were be reduced
considerably by using UNO, and as a result the whole work became more
efficient. Please have a look at this document, Uno_the_Idea, for a
more complete explanation."