Quoting bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...>:
- In the end, the two most likely results are:
4b. One of the programs wins and cannibalizes the other.
I think it is fairly likely that Inkscape will end up cannibalizing Xara; code flow is likely to be mostly one-way because the Xara folks have introduced extra barriers to contributing code on their side (particularly if they want copyright assignment).
Xara's advanced features may give it some leverage, but I don't know how much.
- The things that first come to mind with regard to borrowing
from Xara are its renderer and the CDR import support. Unlike Mental I don't consider Inkscape's SPCanvas to be that bad; it's small and reasonably transparent. What's really bad and scary is the livarot renderer, and that's where the slowness lies. Xara's renderer is indeed very fast, and I would love to see it incorporated into Inkscape and/or Cairo.
Let's not forget livarot for computational geometry either. If Xara has boolean shape operations, then it would also have computational geometry code which we could use to replace the livarot in its other capacity as a comptuational geometry library.
In principle, anyway.
Although I hope it is not the case, we cannot rule out the Xara code being as opaque as livarot; proprietary software tends to fester because there is not a priority on aesthetics of code, limited code review, and no public exposure to shame sloppy programmers.
- I would be very interested to see which toolkit Xara will use
on Linux, if any. To me, perhaps the worst part of Inkscape is the GTK, because I have little control over it. It has problems even on Linux (such as the open dialog not working properly, see bug 1018798) but it's much worse on Windows (and no, I'm not referring to win98; there are other extreme annoyances, such as menus not working properly (bugs 954797, 1250240) and the dialogs-not-on-top (bug 969321) as well as the general clunkiness and clumsiness). I don't know if there exists a better cross-platform toolkit but I would like to find out. So I will be very interested to see how Xara does its porting; to me it seems that their UI has too many Windows-specific things to be ported easily.
I think, as far as many of these annoyances go, Qt is the best cross-platform toolkit. However, it doesn't solve all problems (e.g. Rosegarden has problems with "trasientization" of their transport dialog just as we have).
Additionally, use of Qt signals/slots requries a non-standard dialect of C++ (MOC, handled by a special preprocessor), and it does not play so well with STL and other standard C++ library facilities.
Given that, there's a strong bias towards using Qt's own container classes and such, so Qt has a tendency to "infect" non-GUI code too, much like MFC on Windows.
gtkmm, despite the deficiencies it inherits by being built on GTK, works very hard to stay within standard C++ and be compatible with STL idioms.
-mental