On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 01:47:42PM +0100, jiho wrote:
On 2008-February-24 , at 09:17 , Bryce Harrington wrote:
[...] I think our existing release processes could handle this additional package; it'd just be one additional piece to rev and upload. However, I would love to see a new team of extension writers form around this and take ownership of maintaining it and producing releases as appropriate (and hopefully more frequently than the core codebase).
Let me know your thoughts.
I think that extensions (both effects and import/export filters) but also palettes, gradients and patterns, are things that are really meant to be handled by the "broader" Inkscape community (i.e. not necessarily people with commit rights to an SVN repository, be it Inkscape's or a specific extensions one).
I'd agree. When we started OCAL it was with a hope that it would service this side of the community, and to a degree I believe it has. I hope that as the OCAL import/export functionality matures, it will play a big role in this.
I'd like to see more progress towards this goal of making community contributions more seamless and distributed during 0.47, however the quantity of infrastructural work needed to support this would be too much for a single release. Hopefully the codebase refactoring work, and the website rework, will provide a better underlying platform to build these sorts of things on in the future.
At the same time, I am under the impression that this community is quite scattered presently, both regarding support, potential contributions or showcases of the project. All this scatter and otherwise lack of functionality has, I think, one main cause: Inkscape's current website is not dynamic enough.
Right, so this dips over a bit more into the website restructuring I mentioned a few weeks ago. Once the 0.46 release is out the door there should be more time to focus on it. I'm trying to keep our goals with it modest and achievable, but am hoping once we have Drupal in place, other volunteers can more easily run with ideas for adding more dynamic capabilities to it.
So I think there are two potential next actions on this:
1- Provide a way to *aggregate* the existing information on Inkscape's main website.
2- Provide a new place for people to post content (or turn one of the current services in one). Something where one can just log in and post an extension (<- see, this is where I come back to the actual subject of the post!), a new palette/pattern, a new SVG tutorial, a file template, an xml keys file, etc. for other to download.
I think both these points would make good SoC projects, and would fit with Bryce ideas about SoC 2008: they won't be interacting with Inkscape's code directly but would be valuable to the project and the student. Ok, here it is, let me know what you think.
I think it's a very good idea for Drupal customization for community collaboration. If we have something defined enough for a student, and have someone (maybe you?) willing to mentor a project or two, it sounds feasible. I'd encourage you to flesh out the concepts in a blueprint, for people to collaborate on ideas; sounds like several people have similar desires in mind and it'd be nice to get them fleshed out in a more detailed fashion.
Bryce