On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 06:52:20PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
On 8/24/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> wrote:
Please restore mention of gtkmm. You may not put any value into it or people working on it, but some of us do. It is not on hold, and it is a major change that affects developers and users.
Bryce, you seem to be oversensitive to this. I don't think I'm doing anything that could be described like this. You seem to be reading too much into my words, again :(
That may be, however there have been multiple opportunities to either express support or not about gtkmm, and you generally choose to express disfavor or reservations, so if I have misinterpreted your intent, it is due to the way you've expressed yourself previously. For example, while not all of the gtkmm work was completed for 0.42, there was a huge amount of work put into it, yet in the ReleaseNotes mention of it was reduced to merely a very brief mention of it at the very end of the notes. This is despite the fact that gtkmm was advertised as the primary objective for 0.42.
Also, I don't know why you referred to gtkmm as "on hold", because a lot of dialog gtkmm work was done and new dialogs are being developed with gtkmm. For instance, David Yip has converted some of the old Inkboard Gtk dialogs to Gtkmm. I'm also still working on the rest of the gtkmm infrastructure, just that I'm doing it in the background; I checked in a slew of changes for it early just few weeks ago. I just am no longer working on it as a primary focus, because I wanted to give attention to the 0.42 release, hooking up the donation system, setting up a testing effort, etc. The work is not on hold, it's just not being given as much visibility anymore.
As for the front page, I'm strongly of the opinion that the second paragraph on the project front page is a wrong place for mentioning the language and/or the toolkit of the program (a user-oriented program, not a development tool). Especially when it mentions conversion between two scary sounding language/toolkit pairs, adding to the confusion. For most users this is just a meaningless alphabet soup.
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.
Remember that our audience is not only users, but also to people who contribute to Inkscape. In fact, I would argue that our primary audience is *only* people who contribute to inkscape in some form. (Essentially, if you trace the economics of where value comes from in an open source product, it's not in the form of money from users purchasing the software, but in the form of patches/bug reports/docs/suggestions from users and developers.)
Thus I think that advertising of internal changes such as gtkmm, DOM, code cleanup, refactoring work, language conversion, infrastructure change, etc. is just as important as features that impact users.
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 don't care about scaring away users or not; they'll use the program if it's useful to them, or they won't, and it doesn't cost me or you in any tangible way. Scaring away or discouraging developers is much more important, though, because if they go away, then when you need them to do packaging, or bug fixing, or answering questions about work they did, they won't be there, and it will be that much more trouble for the rest of us.
The risk is that if user facing areas are the only places where appreciation is shown, the project structure will adjust such that developers only work on user facing things, and that necessary underlying or structural work will not receive adequate encouragement, and thus may not get done.
Also, I would encourage you to take note of things that people mention about Inkscape in blog posts, magazine articles, and so forth. Yes, it is true that they remark about the new features, but they have also commented about language, toolkit, and so forth. So I don't think you can make blanket statements that it is meaningless to most users...
Bryce