You guys are going to laugh at this suggestion ...but I thought that I would ask anyway.
I'm the lead developer of Puppy Linux. Puppy Linux is extremely small, the live-CD is only 70M and we have a full suite of GUI applications, including Seamonkey, Abiword, Gnumeric and Inkscape.
Up until recently we had Sodipodi in Puppy, but many people complained they did not like the user interface (although I personally find it okay). So, I went over to Inkscape, but that uses Gtkmm and the binary package is about FIVE TIMES BIGGER than Sodipodi.
One of the key features of Puppy is that when booting from CD, the whole thing loads into RAM, thus freeing up the CD drive for other uses, also giving incredible speed. We use squashfs to keep it small. Our target is that Puppy must load into RAM on a 128M PC, however Puppy is now getting a bit too fat.
What I would really like is to go back to Sodipodi. I will then be able to dump the Gtkmm library (about 4M uncompressed) and Inkscape (about 6M uncompressed). Sodipodi is only about 2M. To satisfy the critics and to greatly rejuvinate the Sodipodi project, redesigning the menu to a "conventional" one would be truly fantastic.
That '6M' figure is for a cut-down Inkscape, with docs and inkview removed, and some other items either removed or cutdown (like the about.svg file).
I contacted one of the old developers of Sodipodi and he explained that there were personality conflicts that caused the Inkscape project fork, then Sodipodi had some bursts of activity, then died. He also warned me the code is crappy in places.
What I'm thinking of is a "Inkscape Lite" based on the Sodipodi code, with some improvements backported from the full Inkscape. The number one thing would be to change the menu structure to the "normal" arrangement.
Is this suggestion totally outrageous? Any Inkscape developer guy with considerable experience with Sodipodi code may consider this idea to be attractive?
Regards, Barry Kauler Puppy URL: http://www.puppyos.com/ My Puppy Developer News page: http://www.puppyos.net/news/ Forum: http://www.murga.org/~puppy/ ________________________________________________
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