On Sun, 26 Dec 2004 11:29:13 -0800 (PST), Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> wrote:
Hi all,
After chatting with Ishmal, Mental, Bulia, and others, it sounds like we ought to shoot for cutting a near-term release, in the mid- to late-January timeframe.
It would be very nice if we could make scripting the main feature of 0.41. Thanks to Bob, this basically works already, though we need more sample scripts, more API, more documentation. Also Ben Crowell's Perl scripts and XSLT scripting are very nice features that should be more accessible, if possible, via the Scripts dialog or otherwise. And Ted has recently added the Effects menu, though I don't know how close it is to being useful.
With the close release in mind, developers please take time to fill in the corresponding placeholders at http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes. Describe what works already and leave placeholders for what you think you can finish before 0.41.
As for flowtext, it is now basically editable on canvas by the text tool, but is quite crashy and buggy, so I don't know if it will get any user-visible advancement in the new version. There's a lot of work to be done there.
From my perspective, the main reason for releasing 0.41 early is the
bugfixes. There are a few very important bugfixes in CVS already compared to 0.40, but we need to squash at least one of the killer Windows bugs to make the release worth its bandwidth. So:
http://troi.hous.es3.titan.com/~rjamison/inkscape/builds/Inkscape0412221011-...
This build uses a version 6.4 of boehm that may fix the Windows freeze bug:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1073459&gro...
So Windows folks who experienced this bug (Scislac, at least), please test this build and report your results here. This is important.
Another serious problem we're having is performance. Mental, you mentioned you had an idea of how to speed up the renderer with a relatively small change. Can you please try this now? It would be very cool to make 0.41 at least somewhat faster than 0.40, because this problem is becoming increasingly bothersome as people start to create more and more complex art with Inkscape.
And finally, as always, everyone please test CVS extensively to make sure we haven't at least broken something which used to work before.