On Sat, 30 Jul 2005, Ted Gould wrote:
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 14:30:55 -0700 From: Ted Gould <ted@...11...> To: matiphas@...8... Cc: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] effects menu
On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 16:57 +0200, matiphas@...8... wrote:
How about translations in custom scripts or those that don't come with the Ink's distribution?
Well, I think that in this case, it's up to the developper to contact inkscape team. Everyone gets benefits from this :
- developper can see its work validated, translated and benefits from the
distribution capability of Inkscape. (plus some support for development, and of course credit for his work)
- inkscape gets some additional tools/extensions/scripts
- user gets more translated, verified features.
I'm not sure what the right answer here is, but I think we can assume that we'll have externally defined extensions in the future.
Definately.
As I mentioned before I think a standardised plugin user interface should help alleviate the problem but it certainly will not solve it.
Likewise, people expect features which require all of these dependencies so things like .deb's "suggested" cause people to not have features they'd expect in Inkscape because they don't grab the additional packages (I don't think Synaptic even shows them).
I think some features have been somewhat over-sold. Users hear Inkscape supports Adobe Illustrator format but they rarely know it requires Sketch/Skencil (nor should they be expected to) and they usually dont realise it is a Unix only feature at the moment.
I'm kinda leaning towards the idea of: The Inkscape team will provide the best, most complete tarball in the world and packagers can weigh these issues for their various distributions.
If we dont provide the version that best shows off everything Inkscape can do who will? I see the downsides but I cannot help thinking most users want the features first and although they want the rest too the features win out.
On the other hand look at the trouble the gimp has maintaining the huge collection of plugins and extensions. All too often people developed extensions to scratch an itch but have little interesting in maintaining and improving them in the long run. Writing the software is nearly the easy part compared to maintaining it, translating it, making it accessible and keeping it consistent with the rest of the program.
The thing we can be optomistic about is that as Inkscape gets increasingly mature we can gradually depend on more and more of the platform libraries we want being preinstalled so at least that part of the packaging complexity will get easier. The level of support we want to provide to what is essentially third party functionality will continue to be a difficult problem to solve (but prehaps we could encourage some of them to turn the functionality we want into shared libraries). Who knows?!
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/