On 2007-April-29 , at 03:18 , Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Sun, Apr 29, 2007 at 01:45:02AM +0200, Eric Bednarz wrote:
I wonder what the current status of a native Inkscape version for OS X (ever since the first announced good news) is (the wiki doesn't really help [me, at least]).
To cut it short:
- I love Inkscape
- OS X is my primary development platform these days (I do have flavours of Windows and GNU/Linux available for testing and special tasks, I'd like to cut that down to testing)
- I want my Intuos tablet to work properly with the calligraphy tool (did I mention that I love Inkscape?)
- I'd rather pump € worth of a CS3 Illustrator (missed
opportunity, as far as I'm concerned ;-) license into a worhtwhile project, if that helps (I don't drink beer anyway [0] :-)
Perhaps the best place to start would be to just get that OSX wiki page up to date. If it's lacking info you need, then that's probably going to be a stumbling block for the next guy that comes along.
I would suggest going through the inkscape-devel mailing list archives for discussion of the OSX port. I seem to recall some detailed discussions back around the time of our last release. You can also see who is actively involved in it and interview them for more info.
I recently updated the wiki page and created a section about native compilation... which is currently empty indeed. Going through the list archive may give some pointers that would be worth copy-pasting in this section but if I recall correctly the method mentioned on the list involved a dedicated Fink tree, modified to use gtk-native instead of gtk... but we don't use Fink anymore because packages versions are too old there. At least such a search would give you more details on the impressions of the few people which got Inkscape to run natively. I would recommend doing the search on Gmane rather than on sourceforge because searching on sourceforge is awfully slow currently. The devel list on gmane is the group gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel . Nevertheless, the only way to get full instructions would be for one of these successful people to write on the wiki. These are Derek Hinchliffe, Michael Wybrow and Ben Fowler at least. Derek has had the most recent success. I asked him if he could fill in the wiki, he told me he would but I guess he is like everybody: too many things to do, too little time. Derek, are you still active and reading this? Do you think you would have time to write your instructions now?
[0] Seriously, I encourage everyone thinking about the issue if you can afford it at all -- personally, I'm not exactly getting rich but wealthy enough to start thinking about it. I've gotten more out of free software (or whatever your label is) than I could ever pay back, which is not say that I shouldn't pay back at all, anywhere. Now that I could afford Adobe products, I'd rather invest into freedom (and to me, there are no 'leechers', 'undecided professionals' maybe, which is unconditionally fine :).
Ironically, it's hard to translate $$ into bug fixes and new code for open source projects, however one time-proven method is to send hardware. I would bet that sending an Intuos to one of the developers would help motivate them to troubleshoot it.
About the Intuos tablet, I would love to see it working too (incidentally because I have one too ;-)) but I am afraid this would only be a second step. Indeed, while the GTK port is usable now, tablet support is still on the todo list. Therefore, if we get Inkscape to compile and run natively now it won't have tablet support anyway. About the money, the GTK port is managed by a company (while still being open to contributions by everyone of course) and has a well identified todo list: http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx/todo I *think* it should not be too hard to sponsor a developer from there to work on one or two specific features you would like to see implemented (like tablet support for example!). Then on the Inkscape side, I guess that we first need the build instructions to know what has to be smoothed and then we need to build and run it to know which GTK-native bugs mostly affect Inkscape. In the end I think it is really a problem of man power: there are very few developers regularly using OS X (two or three I would say, plus me but I only do packaging work) and therefore, any surge of interest in Inkscape on OS X will likely gather more active users and move things forward.
Cheers,
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/