[CREATE] shared resources

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

Okay,

I don't know if everyone has joined this list (or even knew about it),
so if you find it interesting and you are not in this boat yet, please
go to http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create and
subscribe.

For now let me introduce our little world domination project :)

Currently we have several really nice applications that deal with
bitmap/raster and vector graphics: Cinepaint, Inkscape, Karbon14,
Krita, Scribus, Skencil, The GIMP, UFRaw and some other (I hope I
don't offend anyone not mentioned).

We also have a set of typical resources used by most of these
applications: brushes, color swatches, gradients, ICC profiles etc.

The fact is that applications tend to store this kind of data in their
own $INSTALL_PATH/share/$APPLICATION/$TYPE_OF_DATA directories

So every app has it's own copy of that resources, when it's supported.
I believe that this is a wrong way to go.

Thus after a letter by Alan Horkan to gimp-developer@ I have started a
discussion between Alan, Jon Cruz from Inkscape team, Peter Linnel and
Craig Bradney from Scribus team and Boudewijn Rempt from Krita team,
whose main topic is creation of a specification, which would cover
uniform directories for storing different art supplies data. This
resulted in several useful ideas, which were merged into v0.0.1-v0.0.3
of the initial specification.

After Jon Philips' entry in his blog [1] we decided to merge our
efforts and join CREATE.

So please have a look at
http://www.lrn.ru/~avp/specs/shared_resources_spec_0.0.3.txt and let's
discuss, what could be improved, fixed and so on.

I would be very thankful to those people who could help me eliminating
"Needs further investigation" section :)

Moving the specification to Freedesktop.org wiki would help a lot.

It would be really great to see Skencil, Karbon14 and more GIMP
developers here as well.

Oh, there is another long term goal as well: support for metadata
(Author, Version, License etc.) in resources files. We definitely need
it, but this will require design and implementation efforts, which I'm
not sure we all have at the moment.

[1] http://rejon.org/?p=124

Best regards,
Alexandre