On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 10:23:04AM +0200, herve couvelard wrote:
Except in this case, win9* users have it entirely in their power to control this, in that they can participate in providing that support. Indeed, Inkscape can *only* feasibly support a given platform if it has adequate participation by users of that platform.
Bryce
Do you mean that users will have the power to fix the GTK2.8 bug ?
Yes
Don't you think that it's a not-my-problem answer ?
I prefer to think of it as "where-there's-a-will-there's-a-way".
I think that a similar way to improve inkscape much faster would be to supply a todo list, with some hints to do it, and let the users develop it. That way, with such a user base, in 2 months inkscape could achieve a 1.0 goal. (one month for RFE and 1.0 RC1 and one month for bugs)
You can consider the bug tracker to be the todo list; simply search on "WIN98", etc. The wiki has many detailed hints on how to fix the issues. The necessary info is there, it simply requires people with the will to put effort into fixing the issues.
Bug fixing actually is reasonably straightforward given some coding experience and knowledge of gdb. Half the battle is in reproducing the bug, which really requires that you have a dev box set up with the OS in question. Given that, plus some elbow grease and advice from the regular developers, the issues can usually be sorted out. Many of the bugs I've worked on have only taken an afternoon or two max to sort out, and I imagine most of the windows bugs are similar. The first couple bugs would probably take a lot of work, but once you've got the hang of it, many bugs would be within your grasp.
Maybe the issue is just that people with enough interest in computers to be able to get into fixing inkscape bugs, would also have enough interest to use a newer distro than win98. So possibly this is too challenging of a problem to solve...
Bryce