Alan Horkan wrote:
The roadmap does not have an Inkscape 1.0 Stable Release on it.
I think Inkscape is great, and I think there could easily be a release of Inkscape 1.0 Stable in under six months. I dont think this would require much deviation from the existing roadmap just a little extra push for stability and deciding which features are exactly needed to declare 1.0.
I realise that release numbers like 'stable 1.0' are not very important to many open source users and developers and some dismiss it just as 'marketing' but they are very important to ordinary users and it makes it much harder to convince people to use pre-1.0 software and for those people it is very worthwhile to provide stable 1.0 (and it wont matter to the others either way).
It may be necessary to disable some of the advanced features if they do not work perfectly yet but the current feature set of Inkscape is easily as good as Jasc Web Draw (although it is often still quite hard to find all that functionality).
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
Yes, that would be good for marketing. Case in point is Subversion, which has been wonderfully usable for a couple of years, but did not really start getting attention until it reached 1.0 this week.
But there are some costs to putting on a version number like that, that the ordinary user normally does not see. "Version 1.0" normally implies:
1) A stable API 2) A stable set of file formats
....and there is an implied promise that compatibility will not be broken until the major version number changes to 2.
We would need to be able to define our standards, and freeze them, before we go to beta. Can this happen by this summer? Maybe. We are still -very- fluid as we stabilize the codebase and support as much of the SVG standard as possible.
Just my IMHO.
Bob