Gnumeric Turns 5

Jody Goldberg writes "Five years ago, Miguel committed the first code for Gnumeric to CVS. In a testament to the quality of the code several lines are still in use. Since that time the project has grown to more than 300,000 lines and now supports all 325 worksheet functions in MS Excel, plus almost 100 more. This seemed like a good time to thank all the people who have contributed to Gnumeric over the years. We're about to start the run up to the the next stable release which will be out in a few weeks and we look forward to continuing work with GNOME, and the community at large to produce the most powerful spreadsheet in the world."

Comments

Re:Desktop-specific afiliation

[phantomlord]

I personally stay away from the K* apps because I don't want the bloat^ of the QT/KDE libraries installed in addition to the GTK/GNOME libraries. I've been happily using linux for years without ever having to use a KDE app (and thus install the associated libraries) and barring something groundbreaking, I expect it will stay that way for a long time.

Thus the G*/K* naming convention is handy for me. I don't need to download a couple meg pile of source code only to find out that it's a QT/KDE app when I try to compile it

^note, I'm not referring to the size of the libraries but I simply refuse to install half of another DE I don't use simply for the sake of a couple apps

Re:Desktop-specific afiliation

[BrokenHalo]

names that begin with "gn" of "K" is a kind of flag waving that shows which desktop application framework was used

It appears to be so with KDE, but not Gnome so much: e.g. Evolution, Sound-Juicer, File-roller, Drivel, Nautilus etc etc...

In any case, most distros tend to install most of the more popular desktops by default; and unless you really have a tiny HDD, there's really not much point in overriding that unless you have very strong feelings about one or another. For instance, although I'm not personally a big fan of KDE, I still very occasionally use Konqueror to check my html or even more rarely when a page won't load in Mozilla.

Re:For all the hatred OSS has towards MS product..

[Josh Booth]

Since that time the project has grown to more than 300,000 lines and now supports all 325 worksheet functions in MS Excel, plus almost 100 more.

That's standard GNU software for you; the three options you actually use and the 29,854 you don't that were included because some programmer decided that "Hey wouldn't it be cool if my program could read some obscure file in some bastardized format, invented by some yak farmer in Tibet?"

Re:For all the hatred OSS has towards MS product..

[JimmytheGeek]

Let's see - so the OSS app gets criticized for copying Excel, which itself copied lotus 1-2-3. THen you criticize it for exceeding excel. Fucktard.

Re:Desktop-specific afiliation

[don.g]

The $app =~ /$g/i => GNOME and $app =~ /$k/i => KDE thing is annoying, I agree. But it's quite likely that gnumeric is named that way due to GNU rather than GNOME (like GCC).

The desktop prefix IMHO is these days more of a problem with KDE apps (e.g. Konqueror, Kmail, etc) - they seem to go to some lengths to spell things with an initial 'K'. There are many mainstream GTK- or GNOME-based apps without an initial G (e.g. Nautilus, Evolution, Sylpheed, Pan) and with several that do, it stands for GNU anyway (e.g. the Gimp).

> ...the user should be able to (and usually can) run apps using either framework...

The thing people don't usually realise is that all running GNOME apps with GNOME, or KDE apps with KDE buys you is a consistent look-and-feel, and better desktop integration (and thanks to people like freedesktop.org, these differences are becoming less noticable all the time). But you can run them under fvwm with no "desktop" software at all if you prefer. They're X apps, and don't need anything more than a window manager to run.