bulia byak wrote:
The argument was made on Jabber that this was a pretty useless tool. We couldn't recall instances that it had been used or heard from users that were using it for anything more than curiousity. It probably would have been good to mention this on the mailing list before removing the feature; I suppose the thinking was that probably nobody cared one way or the other.
It is very strange reasoning!!! I STRONGLY DISAGREE.
Sorry guys but we represent a very small share of the program's users, and even smaller of its potential users, both quantitatively (in number) and qualitatively (in not being professional designers). We should not take any serious feature decisions without as wide discussion as possible, and especially when we REMOVE something. Jabber is fine for quickly discussing small things, but this is a serious change which requires a balanced, slow, thorough discission. Jabber is not suited for this kind of discussions.
No, we _represent_ all the users. Just like John Howard (unfortunately) represents all Australians. We are the people who care enough to write inkscape, to debug it, to build new features:
http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OtherGoals
The moment we start thinking about the mythical "user out there" we are going to make stupid decisions. The reality is that spirals don't seem to get used as they are too specialised - to test this theory we should remove the icon from the tool bar and see who screams :).
njh