On Sat, Oct 02, 2004 at 02:15:02PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
We have this Spalah program for Flash export. Then we need to incorporate it into our distribution so that no extra installation is needed. Flash export is a very useful thing, even if static only.
We use external software for a number of input formats (dia, pstoedit, sketch, libwmf-bin). Dia is a very useful thing -- as is gimp -- but we don't and shouldn't include them in our distribution.
It's useful for users to be able to upgrade Spalah and Inkscape independently of each other.
Flash export may be extremely useful to some people, but not everyone, and I'd venture to say not useful for most people.
If spalah were distributed as part of inkscape, then we'd have to choose between installing it in ${exec_prefix}/bin (which would be inconvenient for distributions that package both inkscape and spalah) or in ${libexec} (which would make it harder for people to use spalah other than from in inkscape, unless they'd installed a second copy, in which case there may be confusing and typically undesirable differences between the two versions).
Adding spalah to the inkscape distribution would also lengthen compile times, make it harder for people to make their way around inkscape's source tree (e.g. more false hits from grep -r), increase disk space requirements, probably complicate compilation (e.g. do we have a separate configure.in or do we merge into tour existing build system, thereby increasing maintenance cost).
The "extra installation" isn't a problem for people who use tools like apt and emerge: these tools provide a better solution than bundling together anything that might be useful to some people. Incidentally, tools like apt & emerge also make it easy for people to get source code for things, which in turn makes it more likely that users will submit patches for things.
I request that Spalah not be added to inkscape source tree.
pjrm.