-----Original Message----- From: inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:inkscape-devel-bounces@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Maximilian Albert Sent: maandag 24 maart 2008 20:31 To: Vangelis Katsikaros; bryce@...1798... Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] SOC 2008 - project - Guidlines feature
Vangelis Katsikaros <vkatsikaros@...1244...> wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
We have had one good experience with a paired project (for svg filters).
[snip]
While this can make it complex to organize, paired projects can be effective both from the standpoint of doubling the manpower on the feature, and because the students can share ideas, tips,
solutions,
code reviewing, and so on. But they need to be treated as
distinct,
independent projects for GSoC projects, and cannot be
interdependent,
else it makes it harder to evaluate them.
That would be fine by me! However, I don't have enough Inkscape internals experience, in order to propose a way of splitting.
Splitting is indeed an interesting alternative. However, on second thought I'm not sure if it's really worth it in this case. I guess whoever does the guidelines refactoring should simply have other possible use cases in mind. With some guidance and hints from people who have more experience with Inkscape's internals I'm sure Vangelis would do this just as well.
To me the guidelines project is a simple straightforward project (I guess perfect for GSoC, especially if one is new to Inkscape). There is no refactoring needed (perhaps we can switch to cairo rendering to get rid of the ugliness), only add some things to the 'item_handler' and add some widgets to the document properties. The grouping of guides requires adding functionality, but not 'refactoring' perse. Having this view of the project, I find it hard to generalize things without making them just more complex instead of simpler. I guess for generalization, the only thing needed is renaming SPGuideLine to SPCanvasLine; at the moment there is no reason to call it SPGuideLine, so we actually should rename it now. All required functionality is already there (like I said, rendering should be improved, it's just a simple line drawing algorithm I copied from internet as mentioned in the code comment). The magic of the guideline project lies not in the canvas item, but in the guideline specific canvas item handler "sp_dt_guide_event", and in the way SPNamedView handles its childs (for grouping of guidelines), and making it user friendly (!!). Having a some sort of general item handler for the canvasline (to use both for perspective lines and guides) seems difficult looking at the guide specific calls in that item handler.
In short: I think the guidelines project should not be combined with other projects, since (as far as I can see) the overlapping features are already present in Inkscape's code. The guidelines project deals with other things than having a line on canvas.
Regards, Johan