Subject: Open Office 1.0

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 May 2002 16:26:45 +0300

Open Office, the free-er cousin of Sun's "Star Office", has finally released
version 1.0, with sources and binaries for Linux and Windows
(see http://www.openoffice.org/).

While Open Office is somewhat smaller and more agile than Star Office 5.2,
and also seems better and less buggy (and the "integrated desktop" is finally
gone!), it is still a huge monstrosity: the installation takes up 200 MB,
but this is nothing compared to the impracticality of compiling this monster
on your own. Get this: (from their build FAQ):

Q: How much hard drive space needed for a full build of OpenOffice.org
   including source?
A: The current recommendation is 3GB.
   The source code is ~328MB
   The build requires 2GB
   The creation of an installation set requires ~300MB.

Q: How long does an OpenOffice.org build take?
A: Our current experience is that a full build of OpenOffice.org is
   approximately 20 hours on a single CPU Pentium III with 256MB of RAM
   running Linux.

Q: How much source code is there?
A: OpenOffice.org source will have approx. 20,000 source files.
   OpenOffice.org will have approx.  7,600,000 lines of code. The majority
   of the code is C++. 

For some reason, I'm getting the feeling there is no way that they couldn't
have written something as good as openoffice with "only" 1,000,000 lines of
code. Perhaps now that we have 1001 books hyping about "design patterns",
"object oriented programming", "extreme programming", and similar stuff,
someone should write a book on how to write *manageable* software!

I'm guessing at least some of these 7.6 million source lines involve
file-format conversion, help viewing, GUI framework, and a lot of other
things that should never have been part of openoffice, but rather seperate
packages that could be used without openoffice.
The old UNIX pipeline paradigm, where utilities were relatively-small
and worked together in various ways, was one way to create such manageable
software and promoted reuse between different packages (e.g., these is
no reason why Open Office, KOffice, and Abiword, for example, won't all
use the same help system and file format convertors).

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |        Sunday, May 5 2002, 23 Iyyar 5762
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Snowflakes are very fragile, but look
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |what they can do when they stick together!

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 May 2002 19:03:10 +0300

> gone!), it is still a huge monstrosity: the installation takes up 200 MB,

I think I jumped the gun with this rave review.

After a few hours of using Open Office (viewing .doc files and making a
presentation), here is my experience:

  1. It crashed 4 times, one time I lost about 30 minutes of work (now
     I know to save more often...).
  2. Open Office (133MB virtual memory used) and Mozilla (42 MB virtual
     memory) love to fight over my puny 128MB physical memory
  3. It is still not 100%, not even 99% compatible with reading MS-Word
     files. I saw especially bad results in doc files containing images,
     that messed-up all over the text.
  4. LaTeX is stil more convenient to use for long documents/presentations ;)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |        Sunday, May 5 2002, 24 Iyyar 5762
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |This message contains 100% recycled
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |characters.