On 2008-October-23 , at 00:12 , Joshua L. Blocher wrote:
I don't trust the download numbers by any means to be an accurate measurement of where our user base is. You should take into account that on the Linux side people generally get packages via the maintainers of their distribution rather than SF. Plus, the savvy users (of all platforms) pull via svn. Just throwing that out there.
Cheers, Josh
Agreed. Doesn't change my opinion about possible confusion of having multiple back ends for preferences. Or the extra work diverging methods of doing the same thing makes. But since I'm the lone dissenter about this (like the Windows File Dialog) I'll close my mouth.
I think that this issue relates to something that was already discussed several times before, which is: is it better to favour identical behaviour for Inkscape on all platforms or to integrate it as much as possible in the conventions of each platform? I, for one, strongly lean toward the second possibility. I think the most common scenario, by far, is people using Inkscape on *one* platform, rather than on several different ones. And it would make the life of those people a lot easier if the conventions of their platform of choice were respected. Of course, it will make support more complicated, but the support community of Inkscape is wide and probably can cover that (plus, if you tell users to go and check their preferences file and that they don't know where it is, it is not Inkscape support they need, but basic platform support). On this particular "preferences" question, I have a long standing to- do which is to move the preferences from .inkscape to ~/Library/ Preferences/Inkscape/ as it should be on OS X. I believe it is a good idea because it is the first place people will look for them, it does not require resorting to the terminal to access them, it would get along well with backup systems and many other stuff that are standard on OS X. I just never got around to doing it. I also think that gconf is based on a marvellous concept and that it should be generalised, with an even more user friendly interface, to all linux desktops; so if Inkscape can push towards this way on Gnome at least, that would be great... but that is a personal opinion of course ;)
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/