On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, MenTaLguY wrote:
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:41:03 -0400 From: MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> To: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> Cc: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...>, inkscape-devel inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: New Inkscape Goals? (was Re: [Inkscape-devel] update of roadmap)
On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 21:46 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
I don't think it's sufficient for Inkscape 1.
Why's that?
I think Inkscape could be ready for version 1.0.0 in a very short time if that is what developers considered a priority but I can see clearly developers would like to have something with much more features before stablising and tieing things down for a version 1.0.0 which would need to be properly supported for quite a while. I previously pointed out that despite warnings about Inkscape not being stable and effectively being a beta product many people are using and depening on it for series work and it is being "sold" in a way that gives users very high expectations and may lead to disappointment.
Different people have different ideas of what 1.0 is about but it is entirely reasonable that what the developers are interested in will decide. However it is important to realise many users have been so well conditioned by software vendors they simply will not use software which has not reached version 1.0 (and a certain major software company has a reputation for taking three versions to get things right, which only adds to user scepticism).
If you postpone and delay 1.0 it will be less likely to happen, however if solid goals are set it might encourage people (possibly various linux distributors) to help with testing and stablising.
Aside from my opinion and bulia's, read our reviews in the press. The universal expectation out there for a 1.0 release includes a lot more feature and UI work.
We have managed expectations before and we can do it again. I fear some users think 1.0 should somehow be able to stand toe to toe with whatever the latest version of Adobe Illustrator will be, but I believe Inkscape has already gone beyond what many programs have called 1.0 and it could happen sooner if developers actually wanted to make it happen sooner (which I accept they dont) and if things were tied down and stabalised and less polished features were perhaps omitted.
I think it would be better to think of 1.0 in terms of quality and stability more so than specific features (something Debian stable users could tolerate between releases). Otherwise we could very easily keep suggesting more features which developers feel really must be done and 1.0 could easily be postponed indefinately.
Just to pick one example: I wouldn't dare release a 1.0 without a proper layers dialog.
You right of course but as a hypothetical counter example this is as good an example as any of a feature most other vector drawing applications have and if we were making commercial product which absolutely had to be 1.0 and get out there we could hide the layers functionality and instead have only basic groups. That would probably suck, I know the developers don't want to do that (and most users would keep using the unstable versions) but it is just an example. I am only using it as an example of how features could be left out if and when it was decided it was necessary to get 1.0 out the door.
And to change the subject back around to animation (which could get in the way of full compliance to the SVG specs). I'm pretty sure given the current complexity of Inkscape already we really would need to split into a seperate application built around the same Inkscape core to do animation. You can almost think of Inkscape as a Suite already with Inkview and Inkboard, which I think will both get a lot of attention with the next release.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/