On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Ulf Erikson wrote:
There are several bug reports and feature requests that show how people find the current Save and Save As combination to be cumbersome to work with, but.. reading feature requests such as #1520237, #1085718, #1282332, #1377887, #1388131 and #1511930 it is clear that there are as many ideas as reporters on what the best solution is. and often is this idea very much influenced by what other applications the reporter has used before
What are the plans (or thoughts and ideas) about how Inkscape should work regarding saving and exporting files in the future? Is there an Inkscape GUI guru (group?) deciding on what the best strategy is? Is there a document describing such a common goal everyone can help work towards?
The Gnome HIG considers Export and Save a Copy to be synonymous.
Some applications split lossey and lossless files. In the case of Inkscape this could mean splitting the vector formats from the raster formats or even more drastically splitting SVG from pretty much everything else (possibly PDF). This doesn't strike me as a particularly desirable or well organised approach.
To look at it from the top down it is frankly nuts to have a total of more than 4 or 5 menu items for whatever forms of import and export are implemented, it is just horribly disorganised. I'm similarly worried by how Inkscape has so many different menu items for Paste, 3 in the edit menu and another six in the submenu.
Matters are complicated by users wanting to automate the save process. Part of this desire is due to people using save as a crude form of version management. Another part is users batch processing many files (and not wanting to do it from the command line). Treating batch processing as a seperate task from saving a seperate file seems to me like a better way to do things but the current approach is clearly built up piece by piece on top of a single save system.
There are some things which could help alleviate the problem such as basic document management, which according to the Roadmap is planned soon (actually planned for 0.45): "WebDAV/FTP support via GNOME-VFS, Neon, or the like" http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php?title=Roadmap
There is a request for crash recovery which would also help the users who feel the need to make backup copies every few minutes but I thought we already have something like this. https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1527076&gr...