On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 mental@...3... wrote:
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 16:50:55 -0400 From: mental@...3... To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...>, Inkscape is a vector graphics editor inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Re: Inkscape Harsh Criticisms
Quoting Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...>:
That is condescending and dismissive.
...
Please do try to read through the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines even reading a little of it might help give a sense of some of the underlying concepts.
You may want to carefully examine your own tone.
If the Inkscape developers cannot step back and see most of the problems themselves things will only get worse again.
I'll give you a pass, as it's easy to lose track of the discussions now that the mailing list is so high-volume, but most of the concerns you've mentioned have been raised by other Inkscape developers on this exact list, often multiple times.
A few things we do strongly disagree with, sometimes because the requests are impractical or contradictory due to technical issues and annoying properties of the SVG specification (c.f. our discussion re: your request for ellipse-as-<ellipse>
I realise editing the markup directly is a weird obsession of mine few others share. I blame Jasc WebDraw for making it so easy. Realising the techincal difficulties of making this happen I'm willing to ignore this until the distant future until it become less impractical and it is not (or at least should not be) as big a deal to me as I may have suggested.
a month or two back, versus your current demand for the removal of distinctions between shapes and paths).
Huh? Don't think I asked for that.
In many cases, though, things are as they are due to lack of time and/or difficulty in finding workable alternatives.
I got caught up in the frenzy of the release and the brain drain of slashdot and lost sight of the pratical realities of Open Source developments. (My inner troll took control temporarily and tricked me ;)
The current developers are pretty much maxed out, and a most of our time goes into bugfixing and resolving architectural issues.
Fair point, all to easy to forget. I guess I have to be constantly reminded.
Stuff like the preferences dialog has annoyed me for a long time (and I'm on record many places, e.g. here on the list and on Slashdot as saying so), but I simply cannot do anything about it without abandoning other work.
It is the contrast of knowing things are wrong with wanting to defend Inskcape from wild accusations and trolling that makes this situation so awkward.
It often is an either/or choice between bug fixing and UI work for us. e.g. I too am unhappy with the current prominence of the About Memory dialog (which we do want to give to end-users in some form, as it helps them gather information for certain classes of bug reports), but I simply. did. not. have. time. to. do. the. requisite. surgery. on. the. bloody. interface. code. to. fix. it. before. the. release. thank. you.
I guess some of these kinds of things could be metioned in the wiki, perhaps on the roadmap or some where else as known issues to try and avoid frustration about it.
I guess it is trying do usability work on Inkscape is like trying to paint a speeding locomotive!
It's good to raise these things periodically, and in fact I suspect some of them will get addressed soon because they've been raised now.
But, if stuff doesn't get done for a long period of time, _acting hurt when the existing developers don't adopt your priorities_ (regardless of how good they may be in their own right) doesn't help anything.
Lets just say I didn't put things across exactly as well or as clearly as I might have liked to have done.
It leaves people feeling like they are expected to be your personal monkeys.
I'm sorry if I was too overbearing. What I was really hoping for was for more of the really minor trivial changes could be quickly fit in with other changes by developers who could get things done a million times quicker than I possibly could. I've also assumed there was more agreement with my suggestions than perhaps there really was.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/