on Mittwoch, 6. April 2005 23:09 Joshua A. Andler wrote:
Well, the question is, is there any possible way to have inkscape autodetect on startup to see if the appropriate dependencies are installed, and only give options to use them if they are available?
Hmm, I think this also would lead to confusion and lots of inquiries and support questions ("My eps import is broken!", "HELP!!!!! I can't export to ps!!!!!").
It's a tease to see the .ps or .ai file formats listed if you cannot really use them right away (out of the box, so to speak). Another possibility is to have it give a specific warning when you try to use a specific feature.
Would be a bearable compromise, imho. Giving the user necessary information why a special action is not available (s.th. like "Sorry, foo import is not working because of unfulfilled dependencies. Make sure you have installed the following packages: foo (www.foo.net), bar (www.bar.org). Please note that this feature is not yet available for platform xyz.")
And my last potential solution is that we need to package the necessary files to give inkscape this functionality natively.
Yepp. This, of course, would be the most userfriendly solution and *my* preferred one. If one wants to reach a greater user base one will have to face the fact that most users don't want to go hunting dependencies of dependencies.
I know that the Unix/Linux approach is "one application per task and not more", so all applications should make use of the capbilities of each other. On the other hand I don't quite see what's the advantage of installing the whole skencil-package including it's python dependencies (which even don't get installed properly here) when I never use it at all?
Finally, just to make it perfectly clear: I'm totally speaking from a user's point of view here and I don't have a clue how much work and difficulties my suggestions would cause for the developpers, which in my opinion make a great job and really are open for suggestions and ideas and often do implement them in breath-taking time. Kudos to you!
Cheerz Lars