Flexisheet, (was: Re: GNUstep @ FOSDEM - status update - cancel it or not? )

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi David,


> The few references I could find to this look very shiny.  I've wanted
> an Improv clone for a long time - I started working on one about a
> year ago but got distracted into compiler writing before I did much
> coding, so I'm really pleased to see someone else has done it.
We of GAP had the idea of a spreadsheet in mind since quite some time. But
of course starting one from scratch is a big effort. Once we found
Flexisheet we had ain itnersting base, especially given our "NeXT" legacy.
The disadvantage is that ebing different in concept, it will be more
difficult in the future to have import/export capabilities towards excel,
lotus 123, gnumeric, star office, etc.

I wonder you hear about this only "now" since news abotu flexisheet have
been floating around on some blogs, icnluding Gregory's, since the last
AlemanniaStep meeting. we intend to work on it during OrobienStep too, i had
invited you and I think Quentin forwarded you the invitation since he
couldn't come. You are still in time!

> But where is the official site?  All the links I found that claimed to
> point to it are 404s and the SourceForge repository doesn't appear to
> have been touched for 4 years.
Yes, you are right. Although we were able to contact the original author to
confirm that he is OK that we evolve the application and port it to GNUstep
and he gave us CVS access on sourceforge. But not as project admins. THus
after repeated requests I just put it inside the GAP cvs repository hosted
on savannah (/gap/user-apps/Flexisheet).

The status of the application is that we found an "alpha" release, the CVS
code is not the same of his last binary release, some experimental stuff was
put in.
The first efforts were of cleaning the project up and having it compile and
work on GNUstep while still retaining mac 10.2 and 10.3 compatibility. Up to
now we succeeded in not "breaking things" on the Mac yet improving GNUstep
with the same codebase.
GNustep uses all the NIBs and thus Flexisheet was and is one of the testbed
applications for all the cool new NIB loading code Gregory and Fred worked
on, the same goes for the ICNS loading. The results are pretty good.

Yet the code is a bit fragile. It surely workes reasonably on the Mac, but
only on that: it is absolutely non-portable code. We must continue this
path.
Furthermore some features were never implemented, you can check those in the
todo file.

I haven'ìt announced it yet and there are no public pages on the GAP website
because I wanted to wait for a first beta release before. That is GAP
policy.

In any case, since you are interested, get the cvs, anonymous is available.
If you want write access, get an acocunt on savannah and contact me, as
co-leader I can enable you.

Currently I personally prefer to get working what is there (bug fix) and
implementing what was projected and is missing (like printing, IIRC). Then
we shall do a stable release. Evolutions and new features should follow.

Thank you,
  Riccardo