On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 11:22:52PM -0700, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
On Sep 23, 2005, at 6:41 AM, MenTaLguY wrote:
Aside from my opinion and bulia's, read our reviews in the press. The universal expectation out there for a 1.0 release includes a lot more feature and UI work.
One thing people tend to expect is that extensions/plugins for some 1.0 product would stay compatible with 1.1, 1.2, etc. all the way up until 2.0. We've got a surprisingly functional API at the moment, however people have roughed out a much better long-term API. I'd personally say a stable and robust extensions API is one of the critical things needed for a "1.0".
I think if we get caught up in "perceived expectations" we may never reach 1.00. There are many, many, many features that we can expect that someone may expect to be there. In reality, no matter how hard we try, we will most certainly violate someone's expectations. The only thing we can really control is our _own_ expectations.
Thus, I'd like to suggest we completely ignore what we think external folks may or may not expect. Ignore all the reviewers and critics and what they think should or shouldn't go into Inkscape 1.00. We're the people devoting a portion of our lives to inkscape; our opinion is what matters. What do *we* expect to be in 1.00?
I've actually been pleasantly surprised at how viable our current extension API has been. The idea of using simple stdin/stdout filter programs has proven to be more robust and extensible than even I had imagined. We've gotten an incredible amount of mileage out of it. I would not be at all ashamed to release 1.00 with no more sophisticated of an extension API than what we've got now.
If by some chance of fate we *did* suddenly come up with a better extension API immediately after doing 1.00, I'd have no problem with bumping us up to 2.00. In practice, though, I bet we'd find a way to keep our current stdin/stdout extension API in addition to whatever clever scheme we come up with; the stdin/stdout approach is just proving to be too dang handy to drop. :-)
Bryce