2007/1/22, Jon Phillips <jon@...235...>:

On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 15:34 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 02:38:22PM -0800, Jon Phillips wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 14:11 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > > The reviewer felt the speed and ease of picking it up gave Xara an
> > > edge, unless you're a professional graphics guy.
> >
> > What about the community aspect of the projects? Did you all see the
> > article about how Xara dev. has dropped off and people are not happy
> > that they aren't committing patches or aren't that helpful to possible
> > community members?
> >
> > http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/12/19/2032224&tid=39
>
> Yes, this is a hidden strength of Inkscape.  It's also amazing how
> deeply we've penetrated the Open Source community.  Being 100% open
> source down to the renderer has helped us here, as has our goal of
> working closely with other community projects.
>
> But this presents a question worth discussing:
>
>   "What should Inkscape's next set of goals and objectives be?"
>
> In the period from 0.44 to 0.45 it feels like we've achieved a lot of
> key goals we'd set out for ourselves from the start of the project.  We
> are seeing many 3rd-party extensions created for Inkscape.  Distros
> include Inkscape as a vital component.  We've got ports to all major
> computing platforms, and to a heap-load of languages.
>
> Certainly, there's still much left to be done and many features to go
> before we fully support the SVG specification.  We also know of a number
> of key features (Cairoification, PDF, DOM-based scripting) that are
> still high priorities on our todo list.  But I think now would be a good
> time to get our RoadMap reorganized and into proper shape, to allow us
> to better focus on the specific objectives that will enable us to meet
> our own goals.  A common risk of community-oriented projects like ours
> is loss of focus; while I think we've done well at staying on track, it
> couldn't hurt to re-evaluate our existing goals and identify new ones to
> adopt.
>
> What do you think of these as goals?
>
>    * SVG editing (compliant and efficient)
>    * Professional graphic art drawing (powerful and beautiful)
>    * Technical drawing (flexible and reliable)
>    * Amateur artist drawing (fun and easy)
>    * Inspires community participation in FLOSS

My only issue with this is possible bloat because of too many goals.
Before we discussed working towards and Inkcore strategy, where the core
of inkscape could be a library/set of libraries and inkscape uses this
core. Thus, other projects could sprout that focus on using this core.
I'm thinking inkview, inkpresent, inkbrowse, etc. Check my blog
post-lite on this:

http://rejon.org/2007/01/02/the-open-source-raster-core-gegl-004-released/

Anyway, as concrete goals, I think SVG editing is still the key goal to
promote. I think professional drawing and amateur drawing might compete
a bit, but obviously, by supporting SVG profiles, we get both amateur
(SVG Tiny) and professional (SVG 1.1/1.2), right? Jon Cruz, what do you
think?

> I don't think any of these mark a serious shift from the directions
> we've been on already, but it helps to spell them out explicitly.
> Anything else missing?
>
> As far as near-term objectives, I don't see a reason to change our
> objectives necessarily, but it could help to itemize them a bit more
> clearly.  Some thoughts (ordered by importance, not milestone):
>
> 1.  SVG Tiny Support:  This has been our ultimate objective for a while
>     now, and I think it should remain a primary objective.  With filter
>     support we're now a nice step closer.
>
> 2.  PDF Import/Export:  We made a fairly good shot at this for 0.45 but
>     ultimately missed the mark.  I bet we could nail it on a second
>     shot.
>
> 3.  Fonts:  While we've considered font support to be a "done"
>     objective, based on the number of bug reports, clearly this needs a
>     lot more focus than we've given it.
>
> 4.  Codebase refactoring and documentation:  With as many contributions
>     as we've received, it's no surprise things have gotten cluttery, but
>     for future maintainability it would be beneficial to spend a focused
>     amount of time finishing various refactoring projects, excising old
>     code, documenting stuff, and simplifying our build process.
>
> 5.  Extension/DOM/scripting architecture:  We have a lot of the
>     necessary bits in place, they just need muscle to get them from the
>     70% mark up towards the 90% mark.  My feeling is that this is
>     extremely important - if done extremely well, this could enable a
>     LOT more people to help us meet a much more aggressive set of goals.
>
> 6.  Performance:  This is a key area where we compare poorly against
>     with Xara.
>
> 7.  Cairoification:  Big project, but still important.  We need a cairo
>     canvas layer before we can start this.  There's a few options out
>     there to consider.
>
> More thoughts?
>
> Bryce

I think we need to be clear that 0.50 is SVG Tiny (which is now called
SVG Mobile) and 1.0 of Inkscape is full SVG 1.1 support.

Could these be added to the roadmap. I think that having clear
short-term, SVG Mobile, and longe term, SVG 1.1 is vital to our
incremental strategy.

Inkscape's strength is the community. We rock :) I'm also curious if
anyone out there would be interested in either A.) funding inkscape
development B.) working for funders of Inkscape development

While we are good at scratching our itches, I wonder what we could get
done that we aren't doing by commercial dev. Of course, they would have
to follow the community guidelines, etc, and ideally would be inkscape
devs.

Jon

--
Jon Phillips

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USA PH 510.499.0894
jon@...235...
http://www.rejon.org

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IRC: rejon@...897...

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