On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 12:38:54AM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
I generally just don't comment on this - it's not my domain, I cannot comment on everything. And naturally, when I do comment on it, this means it somehow crossed my way. It's not because I "do not put value in it". Absolutely the same situation, for example, is with makefiles or packaging - myself I'm unable to touch them at all and so never comment on them, _except_ when someone breaks something that I notice.
I understand, however it is often useful to comment even on areas you don't normally touch if only to encourage the people who are working on those areas you you can continue not having to worry about it.
Also, I don't know why you referred to gtkmm as "on hold"
Based on nothing else but your own announcement that the gtkmm work planned for 0.42 is not completed and will be postponed. Sorry if I misunderstood that.
Yes, it was postponed until after 0.42, but I've continued work on it subsequent to the release. I've not really made much mention of it, so it was probably natural to misunderstand it.
I know that as you mention, you personally care to only report things that will affect users directly, however I am strongly of the opinion that when you do this, you inadvertantly discourage work on other important areas that are less user-facing.
If I _don't_ mention gtkmm on the front page, I don't think I'll discourage anyone from anything. But if I _do_, I will likely scare away some users.
I would assume the opposite to be honest. Besides, with the mention of XML, SVG, CSS, W3C, PNG, etc. whether gtkmm or C++ is listed there seems like it wouldn't make much difference. If the user is so weak as to be scared off by acronyms, they'll have been scared off long before they'd hit gtkmm. ;-)
Honestly, though, I think from a marketing perspective this qualifies as microoptimization. ;-) If there desire is to maximize users, then there are things that can be done that would have a much bigger effect on userbase size. (In fact, there is a possible opportunity I've learned of which may increase our userbase quite dramatically.)
I guess my major issue is not so much that you don't care for the gtkmm work, but the worry that there may be many other really important internal work that people are doing that is getting suppressed because it is considered "non user facing".
I'm not "suppressing" anything. We're just dicussing the top of the front page contents, nothing else.
Pretend that you *did* actually care about what widgetset, language, etc. the code was implemented in. For example, imagine you are a company considering contributing code to the project but need to find out if your code is going to be compatible with Inkscape. Now start from the current http://www.inkscape.org page and see how far you'd need to navigate to find this information.
I would say that if we scare away users, we scare away developers too. Nobody likes to work when his work is unused. Getting a huge userbase is one way to lure developers, if only because they would be honored to work for such a visible project.
Nah, you hardly ever hear from users you've scared away; you hear from users who have joined and are happy with it. I would argue that the more important point is that developers feel that their work will get attention, even if they are not working on user-visible features.
Also, for the purposes of gaining developers, I think it is more important for an open source project to appear developer-friendly than for it to have a huge userbase. Yes, large userbases can attract developers, but only to an extent; consider how many large projects there are out there that lack sufficient developer attention. If we focus on gaining developers and making them feel welcome, as we have, then gaining a large userbase will occur automatically, which is exactly what has happened. :-)
In any case, if our goal is to gain users, there are other approaches which would be much more effective. If this is the only reason for removing "gtkmm" and "C++" from the top of the main page, I don't think it is a strong enough reason. Unless and until someone puts together a dedicated developer.inkscape.org as Alan suggested, I think these things should be restored to our main page, or at least be added near the top of the FAQ.
Bryce