I made the official request, but they are understaffed and declined.
My own humble opinion is that a word processor is a very high value milestone for Haiku. Having looked at multiple OS office suite projects I have come to the conclusion that AbiWord will probably be the easiest to port in the short term. There are others that have more features, more compatibility, more BeOS-ness, but I think AbiWord might be the best one to start with, to get something decent running.
Recently there have been some talented guys bringing some much needed ports to Haiku (Thank you Giova!). If someone felt ambitious, here’s where to start with AbiWord:
From an email:
Martin Edmund Sevior martines@unimelb.edu.au
Thank you very much for your interest in AbiWord. I’m happy to help you as I can, however there is absolutely nothing to stop you getting started by yourself and joining in the community that develops Abiword. We hang around the IRC channel
In all I suggest you follow the instructions we gave our Google Summer of code students for how to contribute.
[quote=AndrewZ] here’s where to start with AbiWord:
From an email:
Martin Edmund Sevior martines@unimelb.edu.au
Thank you very much for your interest in AbiWord. I’m happy to help you as I can, however there is absolutely nothing to stop you getting started by yourself and joining in the community that develops Abiword. We hang around the IRC channel
In all I suggest you follow the instructions we gave our Google Summer of code students for how to contribute.
Abiword was available for BeOS, and AFAIK, was an official port from Abiword team, right?
So, why Abiword team don’t start to port it again on Haiku? We need to do an official request?
Kingsoft Office (aka KSOffice aka WPS Office) is proprietary software and thus can only be ported by the company behind it. They are unlikely to want to do that.
[quote=Giova84]
Abiword was available for BeOS, and AFAIK, was an official port from Abiword team, right?
So, why Abiword team don’t start to port it again on Haiku? We need to do an official request? :-)[/quote]
Not only are abisource understaffed (or should I say they have enough on their plate already), but the BeOS/openBeOS community in 2004 was 20 times the size it is now. Further in 2002, the community was well over 100 times the size it is now. Online communities are getting larger, not smaller. So even if the community got to the some size it was in 2002, it would still be no where as important as it was when the abiword port was first started.
No matter how altruistic people claim to be, people always want something in return for doing something. The team at abisource clearly feel that a Haiku port of abiword would bring them no real gain, that it would be great if it was done as part of GSOC or by the Haiku community, but that they have no interest in doing it themselves.
It is a bit like asking the Haiku devs to invest a lot of time into getting Haiku to run on the PPC Genesi Pegasos. It would great, but their are much bigger fish to fry; namely R1.