On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 08:50:26PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
I would be concerend that Command line arguments should not be needed by most users
They are needed by some, that's enough. We get questions on how to use Inkscape in scripts regularly.
Might just mean the command line arguments are not very user friendly.
Oh please. Are you arguing just for argument's sake? ;-)
- if many people are using them then batch features of the GUI
would need to be improved.
No, the GUI use and the command line use are quite orthogonal. Both are being improved but they will never converge or replace one another.
Perhaps I should have phrased that differently, there will always be a place for command line features because it allows inkscape to be pipelined together with many other command line utilities. However I dont think anyone would disagree that it might be useful if the user interface provided a way to achieve a batch task like exporting each layer of a document as a seperate image.
Given this comment, I can tell you don't have strong insight into what people running inkscape from the commandline are using it for. Many of the people whom I've spoken to that are using it in this fashion are doing so in a web environment. There is no X server, and thus a GUI batch function would be inadequate.
I think you may be conflating these issues with scripting, which is yet another (quite separate) use case, and takes the discussion too far afield to address further.
- Release notes for the current version
I would think people (adminstrators?) would read the release notes before or while downloading the new version. The Changelog and News files provide even more information.
You probably missed that the developers decided to cease maintaining a Changelog, and evidently have missed that the NEWS file and the Release Notes are one and the same.
given the amount of new features in our versions, and their detailed descriptions in the release notes, this menu item will certainly be consulted more than once.
It is great that the release notes are of such high quality and provide good descriptions but shouldn't this information really be in the manual and tutorials?
It is. I don't think you understand the way documentation works with Inkscape.
Inkscape actually has one of the best documentation writing flows that I've seen in open source projects. Traditionally, developers are very resistive of writing documentation, and documenters are very resistive of "just read the source code", so as a consequence many FOSS projects suffer along with little or no docs at all.
The workflow in the Inkscape project has discovered a comfortable compromise. We impose the (modest) requirement to developers that when they add a feature, they add a bullet point or two about it to the release notes. They aren't obligated to write a tutorial or update a manual or anything major, just a few sentences. Sometimes someone else even does it for them.
In return, documenters can use those comments as a springboard from which to create more extensive, proper documentation and tutorials. In a way, because the developers *don't* take responsibility for writing the docs themselves, this has opened a great niche for writers to fill, and we've all benefitted greatly as a result.
The Release Notes are a crucial piece of this workflow, and its importance cannot be underemphasized. They are the authoritative source of knowledge about the program, and well worth being included in the help menu.
They also provide a very useful brief "what's changed" list. It is possible some may read this when they download and install inkscape, many people get Inkscape via CD's or distro upgrades or myriad other mechanisms where they won't be exposed to any release documentation. And even if they did, they may wish to easily refer back to it later. Having it in the help menu is a smart solution to a wide range of usage models.
- SVG 1.1 specification at w3.org
Artists are the target users of Inkscape.
Who says that?
Who are the target users of Inkscape? Nailing that down would avoid confusion and help people focus on serving those users and make decision making easier when tradeoffs must be made.
Artists are one target group right?
Bryce has said before "contributors" are possibly the most important group. The tendency then is to think of contributors in the narrow sense of developers contributing code and Inkscape becomes increasing about techincal drawing. It is much harder to make things easier than to just make them possible.
Hold on there. If you re-read any of my screeds where I speak of the value of contributors, I ALWAYS follow with a long dissertation about how contributions come in many forms, and that even non-coders can bring extensive benefit to Inkscape through translation, documentation, PR, and so on.
You're also making a jump that programmers only care about technical drawing features. Boy I wish that were true. ;-) The evidence in Inkscape shows that random external code contributors care about a huge range of features, especially including artistic features.
Much as I might love to have experts and testing on large samplings of live users...
Alan, this can be done quite readily through listening to the users who are posting questions on mail and irc. ;-)
(Seriously, I recall you had done this approach a few times in the past, and your well researched information was fairly convincing.)
Bryce