# from bulia byak # on Thursday 27 April 2006 08:22 am:
I agree with everything Charles said, and I was not trying to say we need internal PDF support _instead of_ UC, but rather _in addition_ to it. Here are a few very practical reasons why:
As I said, I don't plan to stand in the way. If inkscape beats vx to pdf, it just becomes another hop to get there. Big dependency for an svg2pdf converter, but ram, disk, and network are cheaper than coding hours, so it's a fairly pragmatic shortcut. This is of course looking at it from the perspective of a system that wouldn't otherwise have inkscape installed (say, a CAD workstation.)
- My expericence shows that even in the best commercial products,
vector import/export is ridiculously inadequate. Quirks and errors are the norm, not exception. Therefore it's always good to have an alternative route.
- PDF is not just "a" vector format. It's the closest we have to the
most common denominator. Its support is critical for interoperability.
I would like to know of any hard technical reasons why this cannot work via VX. I really do want Chromista to be a superset of svg,xar,ps and pdf, so if something is glaringly missing, I would like to hear it.
- UC requires not only Perl, but lots of Perl modules. For example,
even on my Linux machine I still cannot run it because CPAN errors out when trying to install the needed stuff. So for UC to be usable, especially on Windows, we need to carry all this stuff packaged with
Please send me the error? OS/dist? perl --version ? I would be thrilled to help you fix it and maybe figure out how to avoid this on other systems.
Perl is really very cross-platform. CPAN has been around for over 10 years now and while CPAN.pm has some (internal) warts, it "Just Works" 99% of the time.
I had hoped that the copy/paste install instructions would do the trick. I've only got a limited number of machines to smoke test on. As for windows, it is certainly possible to create a binary package with a frozen perl version and everything else.
--Eric