On 8/24/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> wrote:
That may be, however there have been multiple opportunities to either express support or not about gtkmm, and you generally choose to express disfavor or reservations, so if I have misinterpreted your intent, it is due to the way you've expressed yourself previously.
I generally just don't comment on this - it's not my domain, I cannot comment on everything. And naturally, when I do comment on it, this means it somehow crossed my way. It's not because I "do not put value in it". Absolutely the same situation, for example, is with makefiles or packaging - myself I'm unable to touch them at all and so never comment on them, _except_ when someone breaks something that I notice.
For example, while not all of the gtkmm work was completed for 0.42, there was a huge amount of work put into it, yet in the ReleaseNotes mention of it was reduced to merely a very brief mention of it at the very end of the notes. This is despite the fact that gtkmm was advertised as the primary objective for 0.42.
In Inkscape, everyone writes release notes for his/her stuff. I NEVER edited others' stuff out, I just made it more readable sometimes. And I spent a lot of energy asking people to write up their stuff. You were absolutely free to write as much about GTKmm as you saw fit.
Also, I don't know why you referred to gtkmm as "on hold"
Based on nothing else but your own announcement that the gtkmm work planned for 0.42 is not completed and will be postponed. Sorry if I misunderstood that.
I know that as you mention, you personally care to only report things that will affect users directly, however I am strongly of the opinion that when you do this, you inadvertantly discourage work on other important areas that are less user-facing.
If I _don't_ mention gtkmm on the front page, I don't think I'll discourage anyone from anything. But if I _do_, I will likely scare away some users.
Remember that our audience is not only users, but also to people who contribute to Inkscape.
Sure, but even if I'm developer, the first thing I'm interested in is what kind of project this is and what it can do. Based on that, I will decide whether to contribute or not. I don't think people contribute to Inkscape because they want to work on gtkmm; they do this because they like the program.
Thus I think that advertising of internal changes such as gtkmm, DOM, code cleanup, refactoring work, language conversion, infrastructure change, etc. is just as important as features that impact users.
Sure, but not up front. These two paragraphs were copypasted entirely in a LOT of places (do a google search), simply because it's the easiest way to add a blurb on Inkscape, and I'm sure 99% of people who quoted this had no idea of what gtkmm is, nor did their readers. So we were just contributing to the entropy of the universe :)
I guess my major issue is not so much that you don't care for the gtkmm work, but the worry that there may be many other really important internal work that people are doing that is getting suppressed because it is considered "non user facing".
I'm not "suppressing" anything. We're just dicussing the top of the front page contents, nothing else.
I don't care about scaring away users or not; they'll use the program if it's useful to them, or they won't, and it doesn't cost me or you in any tangible way. Scaring away or discouraging developers is much more important, though, because if they go away, then when you need them to do packaging, or bug fixing, or answering questions about work they did, they won't be there, and it will be that much more trouble for the rest of us.
I would say that if we scare away users, we scare away developers too. Nobody likes to work when his work is unused. Getting a huge userbase is one way to lure developers, if only because they would be honored to work for such a visible project.