Hi, Given that I'm pretty new to the Inkscape developement world, I had a couple questions.
The first is this: what hurdles stand between Inkscape today, and v1.0? I love using it, and I've now completely migrated over from CorelDRAW. I'm really keen to see Inkscape develop and become more and more popular, for a couple of reasons: 1. it's good for the world, and 2. more users mean more developers which means more features/innovation more quickly - which is good for me!
v0.45.1 is great, and v0.46 will be even greater. I'm now happy to use Inkscape for most of my design work. It's not perfect - it's a bit rough around the edges, but in general it does the job pretty well. From my point of view, the app needs a bit of polishing here and there to improve slickness, but generally it's in pretty good shape. However, reading the roadmap it says that we're at least 11 releases away from v1.0. If you're roughly on a 6 month release cycle, that puts v1.0 at least 5 years away!
Surely that's not right?
I worry that until Inkscape gets to >v1.0 it will be seen as "experimental" and "unstable" by many. I worry that until 1.0, the app will languish, not attracting the user base or developer base it deserves.. Companies won't trust it, and Ubuntu probably won't bundle it for example.
So to rephrase my question: how many of the tasks in the roadmap are *truly* necessary? Maybe I'm being niéve, but surely inkscape doesn't have to be all things to all men - even at 1.0. Many of the ideas seem tantalysing; I can't wait. But surely we need to sort between "must have" and "nice to have". We can add the "nice to haves" into v1.1, or v2.0 just fine, no?
I'll ask my second question in a second e-mail.