On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 05:42:10PM -0700, rygle wrote:
Bryce Harrington-5 wrote:
Talk with ishmal about these - he's the official packaging guy for Windows so is the one that takes care of this.
Thanks for your help Bryce. Still looking at the fontfactory.h thing - I think it's an #ifdef win32 problem, but because I'm not a programmer I need some help.
Okay, good luck. Thanks for working on the windows printing bug, it's a key one for getting the windows release out, and if your patch fixes it, it will earn much appreciation.
About the packaging - I've tried emailing Ishmal several times to ask him about libs, both through the facility on Launchpad and via the email address used on this list, and I got no reply at all. I've tried raising the GTK stuff several times in the email lists, and again no reply.
Be patient; he's probably just busy. He often does not reply to my emails either. If you can catch him on irc, that seems to work best.
I tried emailing another dev for clarification about the GTK thing, and got told that I should *never* email devs because they don't answer and it's considered rude. He said "keep public conversations public". But then I see others quoting from email conversations with other devs.
I don't know if that's necessarily a rule (I get such emails often), but it's a good point to keep public discussions public. Generally, a single email to the inkscape-devel list should be sufficient, with a follow up if you got no response after a few days.
I've found this quite frustrating. There needs to be better communication than this, or some protocol or wiki page to help people know how to ask for advice. Even if a dev is too busy, perhaps they could just say that.
Many developers will file their inkscape emails off to a separate folder from their regular day-to-day email, and only check it when they have time to devote to inkscape. Others only spot-check email. So esp. when you're new, you might find it hard to get quick responses. In general, just be patient, give some days for them to reply, and follow up if it's important after a few days.
Or if it's an important issue, ask on IRC since that sometimes can get a quicker response. A couple notes on IRC. First, never ask, "joe, can I ask a question?" or "joe, are you there?" It's better to just ask your question straight off. Second, don't expect an immediate answer; often people stay logged into IRC but wander off from the computer for some time (meetings, TV, dinner, sleep, whatever) and check the backlog when they return. So ask your question and just stick around on the channel a while; make sure to mention the person's nick that you want to answer the question so it'll highlight in their backlog; and then wait some hours (maybe up to 10 hrs) for a response. You can also privmsg people you know well - again, some people consider it rude to privmsg people you don't know out of the blue, but it varies; asking on the public channel is best, unless the topic is somehow sensitive or personal.
I know I had a rant a while back, and I said some things that were not at all justified, and for that I publicly apologise. I have learned to think more before emailing, but I hope that hasn't led to people not replying.
Thanks, we do try to maintain civil discourse, so this is appreciated. I suspect the non-reply is due to people either being busy or not knowing the answer, nothing personal.
Bryce