On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 01:15:32AM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
On file format support, SVG and PDF seem to be the primary vector file formats and PNG (and maybe JPEG?) for rasters are a necessity but everything else is dependent on outside contributors to improve and maintain (be they in the form of patches, libraries, or extensions using other applications). Is that a fair assesment?
Yup.
(There are so many file formats in the gimp which many people have an expectation will be maintained. The gimp developers are responsible enought not to pull Firefox and chuck out the baby with the bathwater and are waiting to devolve a lot of these into seperate plugins not included by default. Making the core formats clear up front and requiring active maintainers helps aviod such sprawl happening to inkscape, the seperation provided by extensions helps too.)
Good point
Inkscape has made so much progress the Roadmap could stand to be fleshed out some more.
Yeah... I have wished to put some time into it, but just have been too caught up in other projects. It would be great if others could dive into it and remove outdated bits, and add some more relevant stuff. Hopefully we can get it back in shape by the 0.45 release.
Have any of the Inkscape developers been asked to work for hire improving Inkscape? (Not including the Google Summer of code.)
Yes
This seems to be something likely to happens later when smaller businesses take the plunge and switch to inkscape. I think most of the people requesting features at the moment would only be able to offer a donation as a gesture rather than enough to pay a developer for a few days work.
I don't think we want to get into the business of having donations cause reprioritization of work. It seems to work best when there is a full sponsorship for a large scope of work, such as happens with the GSoC. That'd take quite a pool of donations, but I think it could be made to happen.
Bryce