On 2008-February-24 , at 09:17 , Bryce Harrington wrote:
[...] I think our existing release processes could handle this additional package; it'd just be one additional piece to rev and upload. However, I would love to see a new team of extension writers form around this and take ownership of maintaining it and producing releases as appropriate (and hopefully more frequently than the core codebase).
Let me know your thoughts.
I'm not sure how relevant all this would be but here is my opinion.
I think that extensions (both effects and import/export filters) but also palettes, gradients and patterns, are things that are really meant to be handled by the "broader" Inkscape community (i.e. not necessarily people with commit rights to an SVN repository, be it Inkscape's or a specific extensions one).
At the same time, I am under the impression that this community is quite scattered presently, both regarding support, potential contributions or showcases of the project. To get support there are several mailing lists, a handful of forums, the answers site and I am probably forgetting some possibilities. To showcase artwork and potential howtos there are the Inkscape group on Deviant Art, the new inkscape gallery and various others, the terrific screencasting and tutorials sites, and eventually there are several people just posting stuff on their blogs. Contributing to some of those is somehow limited in that you would have to contact the site administrators to get posting rights before doing anything. And, I don't want to presume anything, but if I were them I would probably tell you to post your tutorial somewhere on the web and so that I link to it afterwards. To contribute things to Inkscape itself, there isn't much possibility other than writing an email to the devel list and waiting for someone to pick it up and potentially commit it.
All this scatter and otherwise lack of functionality has, I think, one main cause: Inkscape's current website is not dynamic enough. If there was a forum on the site, people wouldn't have started one, if there was a place to post stuff, people would have started posting tutorials, extensions or quick tips to it. There's nothing wrong with these sites currently (they are of great quality), apart from the fact that their scatter tends to disperse attention. For example, I, for one, would really like to follow what happens in the forum(s) or check if I can help on the answers site. But it would require to log into several different places, identify new things each time, and potentially re-read the same stuff several times... so I just don't and mostly limit myself to reading the mailing lists.
So I think there are two potential next actions on this:
1- Provide a way to *aggregate* the existing information on Inkscape's main website. There is no point in undermining the efforts of the great people that have set these sites up and to recreate the same thing on Inkscape's website. However, it would be great to have *one* place where you can quickly skim through what's new in all these locations and identify posts that are interesting (to you), even if to answer you have to be directed somewhere else (in an ideal world there would be a common posting interface with potential access in a browser and by email but that's probably not going to happen ;) ). You can think of it as a kind of a planet-Inkscape for forums, mailing lists, galleries, and tutorial/screencasting sites. For those concerned about the potential high activity in such a place, I am following some mailing lists which are far busier than inkscape- devel and find that it does not demand more time: skipping stuff is easy and by having a broader content to start with, you end up focusing more on those posts that really interest you or where you are particularly competent. It is win-win for everyone. Eventually, such a gathering point would be a good place to direct users to the right service: if you have a usage question please post it to the answers site, if you detected a reproducible bug please submit it to launchpad, if you want to discuss a new feature please use the mailing list, if you want to post artwork go there, to just chat with friendly Inkscape users go here, etc. This would avoid duplication and give more focus to each of the resources Inkscape currently generates.
2- Provide a new place for people to post content (or turn one of the current services in one). Something where one can just log in and post an extension (<- see, this is where I come back to the actual subject of the post!), a new palette/pattern, a new SVG tutorial, a file template, an xml keys file, etc. for other to download. Those kind of content that are not yet posted somewhere else. To avoid this becoming a inextricable mess with time, simple posting rules should be enforced and a rating system used, to leverage the 'wisdom of the crowds' in the very trendy web 2.0 way (hell, shouldn't we be talking of web 3.0 by now?). ccHost seems like a good base for such a system but there may be other solutions too. On the desktop side of things, this would be accompanied (in the same ideal world as before ;) ) by simple installers which can handle the various forms of content and put them where Inkscape can see them (e.g. opening a gpl palette with Inkscape would do the right thing and move it in the palettes directory). This would allow Inkscape to evolve continuously between releases. Come release time, the best of these new items can be cherry picked and more thoroughly supported (translated etc.) before inclusion in the release. Having those items already available online would also put less pressure on including them with Inkscape. I think many extensions/templates/examples currently included with Inkscape are fairly specific and would have been better suited in a place like this.
I think both these points would make good SoC projects, and would fit with Bryce ideas about SoC 2008: they won't be interacting with Inkscape's code directly but would be valuable to the project and the student. Ok, here it is, let me know what you think.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/