Hi Andrew, thanks for your honest and open words, this is something I surely appreciate.
Let me say in advance that we aren't too far apart in a lot of your items, but that I nonetheless would not agree to your "mostly unusable" judgement (which is what I read - in other words - in your mail; no offense intended). For the question of our target audience: Well, this is implied by the target audience of OOo as a whole. One major goal of OpenOffice.org 2.0, which you can read all over the place at oo.o, was "Micrsoft Interoperability". Refining the pure catchword here, it was "make Microsoft Office users move to OpenOffice.org". A lot has been done there, often discussed very controversial (for instance the "make us look and feel and sound like MSO at nearly all costs"-paradigm followed in the main applications), but all for the sake of potential MSO-migrators feeling as comfortable as possible in OOo from the beginning (it's about the famous migration and retraining costs). This greater goal also implied the goal for Base - give the user something competing with MS Access. People, stop the laughing ;) - we all know that we're not there, not even remotely. Since one major strength of MSA is the capability to create database-driven applications (which don't look like databases at all), the target audience of Base should (should! see below) be the developers of such applications - this in fact is my serious and deepest belief. OOo Base 2.0 does not allow for this audience, for a number of reasons, of which you mentioned a lot: the "forms are text documents"-problem, the missing macro capabilities, the immense complexity of (important parts of) the API, and so on. For quite a while now, the OOo team (the Sun part of it, honestly) is discussing what we (!) think should be the goals for post-2.0, and I constantly argue that we should make Base a platform for application development, exactly for the "applications" targeted at the groups of 3 to 9 users you're mentioning. Well, I also know that OOo 2.0 Base is *not* the right tool for developing database-driven applications. What we did as a first step was exactly the "self-contained database file" feature, which was a requirement for everything else. This feature itself has its quirks (issue 54609 being one of them), but I don't think they make Base as such useless. In fact, I would have much more confidence to recommend Base 2.0 to my father (as an arbitrary example for a non-computer guy) for his, say, video collection than I would have had for Base 1.x. Okay, he would still have to call me for some things (which means there's still enough need for support), but I believe he could do quite well - alas, better than with 1.x, for sure. I agree that Base 2.0 is not for the "developer" (apostrophised 'cause potentially every end user is a "developer") who wants to create the above-mentioned data-driven applications, but I nonetheless think we already have an audience aside the application development. Finally: Yes, there's a huge amount of work to be done after 2.0 (wouldn't it be boring if there weren't?), but we made a first good (IMO) step, which I'm not too unhappy with :) Reards Frank -- - Frank Schönheit, Software Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] - - Sun Microsystems http://www.sun.com/staroffice - - OpenOffice.org Database http://dba.openoffice.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
