On Mon, Oct 04, 2004 at 05:48:01PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
the dia and gimp are both massive and it would not make sense to compile them in, libraries like libwmf and spalah are relatively small.
Actually, libwmf and pstoedit aren't all that good examples either, as they have big dependencies. (libwmf wants ghostscript fonts, pstoedit wants ghostscript itself.)
Adding current versions of spalah-swf and ming to inkscape would increase the size by about 17%.
potrace is an interesting comparison. It increases inkscape's size by about 1%.
However, I think size is less important than other things like adding to the build requirements (flex, bison, libart), making it harder to grep through the source tree, increasing compile times, increasing bandwidth usage and disk usage on developers' machines and servers, adding complexity to installation for people who already have spalah-swf and/or ming installed.
It's useful for users to be able to upgrade Spalah and Inkscape independently of each other.
I'd be inclined to argue that the kind of user that would want to upgrade Spalah independantly of Inkscape
When a new version of spalah-swf or ming is released, I'd guess that most of the users for whom swf export from inkscape is important would be interested in upgrading.
We want users to test things like spalah.
Not sure. I'm more interested in people using SVG than a proprietary format.
Conversely, for improving spalah-swf, there are advantages in it being separate from inkscape: people can be testing a more up-to-date version, and the sources are easier to understand when not entangled with inkscape code, and people are more likely to download the sources if it's separate from inkscape. Adding spalah-swf to inkscape makes it harder to install separately.
If Debian and Gentoo themselves wish to provide specialised packages that would be great but until there is an official stable release I think users should be presented with the full Inkscape experience and not left unware of the possibilities.
Personally I don't consider swf export an integral part of "the full inkscape experience".
This may depend in part on how good our swf import & export is. If we could do a reasonable job of round-tripping with the swf format, then that increases the value. Presumably we'll always do better at round-tripping SVG than SWF though. I don't know of any software for converting SWF to SVG yet.
Instead of adding spalah-swf and ming to inkscape sources, how about providing a links page (or pages, e.g. one page for .tar.gz, one page for FC .rpm, maybe different pages for different distributions), so that people can download inkscape and all interesting related software from one page?
That seems like a reasonable way of making it easy for people to get related software, while avoiding making our source tree harder for people to work with?
pjrm.