KDE's Calligra KOffice Fork Sees Its First Release

[TheBlackCat]

Just wait for awhile. LO is working on a mobile version withstand the gtk Broadway backend. However, don't expect it in less than a year.

Yet the Calligra developers were able to develop an entire new mobile version, Calligra active, in a few months, and one developer as a trial created a partially-working port to android in a few days.

I don't see the point of a KDE office unless it is simply a toolkit exercise.

The fact that they are able to create an entire new mobile interface in no time at all should show one of the points: having a flexible, modular, easily-to-develop-for code base. That is something that LO doesn't have and may never have.

As someone else pointed out, the fact that it needed a 3-month GSOC project just to get a multi-line cell editor in calc shows just how fundamentally broken the LO code base is.

[liam]

I'd say a year is overly optimistic. To get an actual mobile version, real modularization is required: A task that already failed several times.

I am simply parroting the expected date given by, I think it was Meeks. As has been said, getting the entire suite running on a mobile platform will be...difficult (however, I also think that for the near term, at least, it would also be overkill since it would only be really usable with a keyboard/pointer).

So? Most work is already done. Calligra didn't start from scratch but – at least partially – dates back to 1997 (KPresenter was started then). KOffice was mostly held back by text rendering bugs in Qt. It took a motivated Nokia employee to finally fix that bug in Qt 4.8.

Wait, Calligra is based on code that's FIFTEEN YEARS OLD!!! That simply cannot be

I don't know how your math skills make an 1980s code base 20 years old but whatever.

Fair enough. So say twenty-three years (you didn't specify when in the 80's). That is a whole seven years older than some of the Calligra code.
Since this should all be POSIX, I don't see where having an older codebase is NECCESSARILY worse. All things being equal, yes, I would agree, but optimizations are happening since this isn't new information you are giving.

That’s a claim often repeated by LO devs but it only is a small fraction of the true story.
LO’s biggest problem aren’t the unused functions, but the crappy functions that are actually used and not replaced! Its VCL toolkit needs to go ASAP but there are absolutely no attempts at all to completely rewrite the GUI using a modern non-buggy toolkit within the LO community.
The funny thing is that Apache OpenOffice will get a completely new GUI IBM developed years ago for Lotus Symphony, although LO fans already declared OO dead.

At least you didn't call me a fanboy
Meeks pushed a pure gtk3 effort back in Oct (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/000302.html), though I haven't noticed much since. Otherwise, I don't disagree, but, IMHO, the interface isn't a huge priority.

…that achieved almost nothing. Where is the VCL-less GUI? Why are all LO components still in one huge “soffice.bin” process? Why is KDE integration still broken?
Both projects – LO and Calligra – were initiated in late 2010. During pretty much exactly the same time LO devs were struggling removing unused code whereas Calligra devs built a completely new word processor from scratch!

I'm not quite sure why you are asking this question since you've already said the answer. The codebase has needed vast amounts of work. Office suites, as I said earlier, require fidelity, and that can sometimes be hacky (depending on the standard), but it always requires ungodly work to make sure formats are treated the same across platforms (not easy, obviously, when dealing with something like Word's ooxml). Toolkits (unless they actually implement these standards for you) don't really help beyond getting up a skeleton with a bit of skin. It's the stuff inside that takes so damn long, but it's not terribly visible. If you want to criticize LO for anything it should be for not using robust enough format testing. That is the thing that bugs most users.

Fact is nonetheless that Calligra has better MS OOXML import support than LO – a feat achieved in a shorter time than LO even with Red Hat’s and SUSE’s full-time employees.

How do you judge this? The only thing I found that compared the two's ability to deal with formats was a slashdot comment that said that Calligra's equation handling is a bit broken.

IMO it’s a testament to the quality of the code base when a handful of mostly hobby developers achieve more in Calligra than the army of full-time devs achieve in LO during the same time.
TDF will need to invest lots of development time in cleaning up LO’s rotten code base to make it easily extendable.

I think that it is extremly arguable that they have achieved more, but I'm not going to take away from the work they've done. At the same time, do they support ALL of the same formats as LO, and to at least the same degree? If they have, then they are geniuses without parallel in the history of computing and Turing bows to them.

[Awesomeness]

I am simply parroting the expected date given by, I think it was Meeks. As has been said, getting the entire suite running on a mobile platform will be...difficult (however, I also think that for the near term, at least, it would also be overkill since it would only be really usable with a keyboard/pointer).

It is not difficult but basically impossible as long as neither VCL is removed nor LO modularized.
Did you know that when Sun back then to open up StarOffice’s source code, the GNOME project wanted take that code, split it apart and base its “GNOME Office” on it? It was a huge failure: It simply couldn’t be achieved with that messy source code.
Yes, the source code improved since then but it is simply a fact that modularization and VCL removal could still not be a achieved.

Wait, Calligra is based on code that's FIFTEEN YEARS OLD!!! That simply cannot be

Well, yes, but you are missing a very important piece of the puzzle: The big KOffice 2.x rewrite. It took the then-small team years. In fact Kivio’s 2.x/Qt4 port took until a few days ago when it was released as Flow in Calligra 2.4.
The KOffice 1.x source code began to rot and instead of going the OO/LO way to work around fundamental problems, it was rewritten. Heck, since then even KWord began to rot and was entirely rewritten as Calligra Words.

So say twenty-three years (you didn't specify when in the 80's).

And could not look it up on Wikipedia yourself?
StarDivision was founded in 1984 and the first version of StarWriter for the Zilog Z80 was released shortly after.

Meeks pushed a pure gtk3 effort back in Oct (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/000302.html), though I haven't noticed much since. Otherwise, I don't disagree, but, IMHO, the interface isn't a huge priority.

That is just a GTK3 theme renderer for VCL. It is not a new GUI for LO written in GTK3.
And no: If TDF is serious about mobile versions, VCL removal must be a high priority, unless TDF is only targeting future high-end platforms with multiple gigs of RAM and many CPU cores.

How do you judge this? The only thing I found that compared the two's ability to deal with formats was a slashdot comment that said that Calligra's equation handling is a bit broken.

It is so simple: I have installed both and simply opened documents in both.
Granted, I only compared Words with Writer and only with a handful of documents I could find.

I think that it is extremly arguable that they have achieved more, but I'm not going to take away from the work they've done. At the same time, do they support ALL of the same formats as LO, and to at least the same degree? If they have, then they are geniuses without parallel in the history of computing and Turing bows to them.

No, it is not arguable. How many entirely new file formats did LO adopt in the last 1.5 years? Pretty much all file format support was inherited from OO/Go-OO. I was simply referring to the achievements in the last 1.5 years when both projects were founded, not the achievements both predecessors (OO and KOffice) did.
Calligra devs wrote an entirely new word processor because they found KWord to be broken, they wrote a tablet GUI (Calligra Active) and in the master branch actually import support for many new formats was introduced: CorelDRAW for Karbon, MS Visio import for Calligra Flow and MS Project, Planner, and Primavera for Calligra Plan. How many new file formats were added in LO in that time?