Bryce:
Wow, I wish that we could harness all of this email-writing energy on the topic, and focus it on the actual work.
You were absolutely right on your blog. The ratio of developers to users on win32 is much lower than on Linux. If we had just one or two more developers, it would -double- our abilities.
Since the win32 stuff has never been a release in its own right, but just an alternate way of building Inkscape, I don't see any problem with releasing Inkscape immediately, and getting a win32 build out whenever it's ready. People can always get a copy off the server. I mean, we build it several times a day. Just pick a build and package it. And if the users don't like it, then we can refund their money. I am a big fan of Fedora, and would -love- to see 0.46 in Fedora 9.
I'll see what patches we need to get printing working well again soon. Maybe we can do the switch to using the new Cairo1.5+ win32_printing_surface in a patch ourselves, rather than wait for Gtk to do it. If so, then maybe a Cairo guy could help us. There ya go. A good opportunity to delegate. :-)
I have been slightly annoyed recently with the vaguely implied idea that we don't -want- to fix this bug, and that any problems we have with Inkscape must be a symptom of our laziness and disrespect for the user. I can assure people that considerable effort has already been spent on this. I have been hoping that the increased clamoring would be accompanied with increased volunteering. I haven't seen it yet, but Hope Springs Eternal.
bob (ishmal)
Bryce Harrington wrote:
Here is how we can solve this for the release.
Bulia, the new standard Windows dialog was implemented by Kees in Nov/Dec/Jan in r16655, r16860, r16865, r16866 (and maybe a couple others I missed.) Please test reverting these and prepare a patch-set which removes the new print system and restores the old one. Post this patch to bug 179988 and assign it to Ishmal. Please get this done and tested as soon as possible (today or tomorrow preferrably). Hopefully it should not take very long.
Kees, please let Bulia know of anything special that may help him with making this patch, or if you have ideas for a better workaround. If you could clarify which patches need reverted, that could help immensely.
Ishmal, please include this patch in the Windows package. I don't know if you have a deb/rpm-style patching system, but if not, just go ahead and patch source. From your research, it sounds like this will be fixed with the cairo 1.6 release; I asked cworth about a release date for this, and he said it should be within a few weeks, perhaps less, so we probably won't need to carry this reversion patch for very long.
If we can get this reversion patch by tomorrow, then we can avoid dealing with the question of whether to delay, release without windows, etc. etc. It's good to see all the discussion around this (and I'll post my own thoughts later), but at this point what we need first is a patch.
Bryce
P.S., while for Windows it may not an availability issue, it *IS* going to be an availability issue for Linux if we miss the Fedora 9 and Ubuntu Hardy deadlines. Shipping rc's or 0.45.1 in those, when we're so close now, would be embarrassing.