On 21-11-2014 10:41, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 10:05:46PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
FYI: I just had a friend upgrade to trunk to get the 0.91 unit behavior. He actually needs this for work to do a very accurate technical design. In other words: the viewBox change is /awesome/. It is very unfortunate that there are bugs related to it. But backing-off completely is a huge step back. I thought most annoying bugs are related to changing the units for an existing document. Is that correct? If so, all we have to do is warn people about that, e.g. with an extra dialog telling people that changing document unit only works for fresh documents or 0.91 documents. Documents from earlier versions of Inkscape may have troubles.
-1 for warning dialogs. Clutter, plus no one bothers reading them.
Do you have any good arguments against a warning dialogs? The two given are not convincing. "clutter" : one would only see a warning dialog when there is something to warn about, no clutter there. "no one bothers reading them": This is a warning that would pop up very rarely; not something someone would get used to after seeing it 100s of times. And I think it is simply not true that people don't read text in a dialog.
I'm afraid we will run into the exact same problems when we postpone this change to the next release. My intuition tells me that there is no general way to properly upgrade a "broken" Inkscape pre-0.91 document that works in all cases. But I may be wrong of course.
Delaying it to next release adds time we can use to fix the problems.
For example, hiding the "set document units" functionality would paper over the problem but breaks several use cases. To fix that we could add a "Display units" feature that lets the user work in the GUI with a different set of units than are stored in the document. That's not the sort of feature we want to be putting in the week before release but is certainly something we could do in a 0.92 timeframe.
That's just one example, I'm sure other bugs in the list could similarly benefit from having extra development time to work on.
In general, I'd much rather land the unit changes when we can demonstrate significant new improvements to users, especially if it brings risk of bugs or breaking use cases. Right now it sounds like the benefits it brings are being swamped by the bugs.
I meant to say that we should keep the overall units/viewbox change (not the "change unit" feature). There are significant improvements with having proper units/viewbox. For starters: having the SVG document shows well in other viewers.
As Tav wrote, the only bugs left are when someone /changes/ the units on an existing document with things other than simple paths. Having units on a document as-is now works fine, please someone speak up if not.
-Johan