Bryce Harrington wrote:
Since Inkscape started, I've had the opportunity to chat with a number of people, both developers and users, on the topic of integration with other applications. We've also received numerous feature requests from users for interoperability. These range from cut-and-paste, to file format compatibility, to even more elaborate interrelationships such as plug-in functionality. ...[snip] Anyway, so if all GNOME Office really cares about is getting a drawing component for Gnumeric and Abiword, Inkscape will probably be there eventually (sooner if someone pops up to help). If the desire is to fill in a list of apps for GNOME marketing purposes, no issue there. If there is a desire to make Inkscape use certain libs or to be able to have say over the development priorities, that would probably not be well received. If the desire is to assist Inkscape in some other fashion, that'd be wonderful, just let us know; the project's been humming along well so far but there's still much needed.
The ideas for how Inkscape might possible 'integrate' with GO are just that... ideas. There is no desire, I'm sure, for Inkscape to be forced into using GO or AbiWord or Gnumeric libs just for the sake of it. Any ideas were only suggested with the best of intentions, as something that could potentially help the Inkscape project. There was certainly never an intended compulsory nature to any such thoughts. (Perhaps it was me being a bit gung-ho and dreamy about GO in the future that made you think it was so.)
On multiple occasions I've heard the idea of an 'Art Suite' posed. The idea generally identifies Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus, and perhaps one or two other tools such as Blender or Dia. The rationale for making them into a suite revolves around improving interoperability including cut and paste, common file formats, etc. Note though that several of these apps are not GNOME apps (Scribus is Qt, for example). Also, we haven't really talked about this much with the other apps. But this is an idea we've heard much about.
Inkscape could be in multiple 'suites'. Why not be in GO and a separate Art Suite? It's just extra marketing for Inkscape. Everybody wins. ;)
The one concern that a few of us have is that we're uncertain about the extra dependencies that would be added if we were required to adopt a bunch of GNOME Office libraries.
The only dependencies would be ones you (the Inkscape team) wanted. This is a proactive association of projects bonding to each other's benefit. There's no clauses, nothing compulsory necessities other than (probably) Gtk usage and slight HIG adheral.
being given a list of required libs that must be added to Inkscape in order for it to be acceptable as a GNOME Office application leaves some distaste in the mouth.
Nobody _ever_ said you _must_ have/use a set of required libs. Only ideas and suggestions have been brought up and all of those were done so with the best of intentions.
we like having the option of picking and choosing
And that's how Free Software works. ;)
At one point someone identified Inkscape as a possible presentation component for GNOME Office. It is certainly true that people have used Inkscape's 'Inkview' component for doing presentations - I myself used it for my OLS presentation. But I don't think there's any desire to turn Inkscape into PowerPoint! ;-)
I think the idea was to use Inkscape as a basis, not for Inkscape to be the actual presentation application. Like Inkview except taken a bit further, an adaption of Inkscape. The people, that I'm aware of, who are pursuing a presentation application are more oriented around adapting AbiWord somehow or starting afresh. There is a codebase (a module in Gnumeric CVS, I think) that uses (the soon to be) libgoffice.
Oh, and then there's also Criawips which is always threatening to raise it's profile.
So there's lots of ways in which it could be approached, and the bottom line is that they are all valid, and that whomever develops it will do it their preferred way. Nothing new there, that's how development works! But, again, nobody was actually saying Inkscape would be the presentation app... just that it contains a lot of the features that are key to creating presentations. But so does AbiWord. And Criawips. And (yet-to-be-named-or-announced) the code hiding in Gnumeric's CVS server, somewhere.
- Charlie