On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 07:13:55PM -0700, Brynn wrote:
Hi Friends, Frequently there are posts in forums, where people give often detailed, and often passionate requests and explanations for what is needed to make Inkscape what they think it should be. Unless I misunderstand Bryce's comments, it seems to me, including the Inkscape user community in the brainstorming, would be a great source of ideas! Although I notice this was not cross-posted in the user mailing list. So there's a good chance I don't understand.
Right, there's a bit of a distinction here. The roadmap reflects where the developers in particular intend to go. Certainly user requests and suggestions are important input to enable developers to form concepts of what's needed. But users aren't familiar with the codebase or how Inkscape is architected internally, so they don't have the context to know if a given idea is easy or hard, if it's a logical extension of existing code or would require massive internal restructuring.
As well, a lot of the things that need nailed down in the roadmap are lower level infrastructural bits, which often will not be user-visible. For instance, modularizing internal libraries, switching from bzr to git, and adopting C++11 are all going to require broad developer agreement for planning, but will have no user visible effect. But (we think) they'll be necessary to help keep Inkscape development moving forward briskly.
Think of user-visible features like the leaves on the tree, whereas for the roadmap we're discussing more about what limbs need lopped off and which need grafted on to give us the healthiest canopy.
Anyway, if I did understand, I wanted to ask if I could posta message in the forums, quoting Bryce's op on this topic, and requesting input. Or if not, in lieu, could I post links to a few forum messages, on the referenced wiki page, which seem to me to represent an overview of the most frequent user requests? Thank you very much :-)
Yes, that would be great input for the process.
Also, the roadmap can cover more than just the core codebase - anything that will require broad team agreement and/or planning is topical. That could include restructuring how we do tutorials, migrating the wiki from mediawiki to something else, etc.
Bryce