[CREATE] Inkscape questions

[Yuval Levy]

Hi all,

at first I thought to write this to a single person from the community that is 
familiar with the Inkscape project and could help me liaise with the Inkscape 
developers.  But as I read it before hitting the send button I realized that 
this is broader in scope.  Some of the issues raised in my request, including 
the life-cycle of a project; the efficiency of the use of bug tracking tools; 
and the specific issue I have with bitmap rescaling; could have answers 
outside of the limited scope of a single contributor or even a single project.

So here are a few questions which I hope will be answered by those kind enough 
to read them who are more familiar with Inkscape than I am.  Thank you in 
advance for helping me liaise with relevant people - any suggestion to bring 
the conversation to more specific mailing list(s) is welcome.

I am trying to make sense of the discrepancy between

April 2008: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/135

and

June 2011: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape

(634 new, 3083 open) ?


I need a historical perspective.

1. has the project become more popular / received massively more bug reports 
in 2011 than in 2008?

2. has the project lost resources / people that were working through the bug 
reports to triage and fix them?

3. who was responsible for the stellar 2008 performace of bringing down the 
count of untriaged bugs to less than 100?  are these people still around?  
still active?  Kudos to them!

4. how have developers reacted to the restructured tracker?  has the project 
seen more bug fixes in 2008 than in previous years?  and if so, has the pace 
slowed down since?  why?

5. how has the devs team evolved over the 2008 to 2011 period? have some key 
players reduced their involvment / left the prject?  motives?  have new key 
player emerged?  was there a "generational transition" and if yes was it 
managed? how?

I am trying to make sense of the evolution of Inkscape because IMO 
understanding it can help Hugin, which seems to be a couple of years behind 
the curve if there is such a curve for an open source project lifecycle.  I 
suspect there is.  I am also trying to gather annecdotal evidence to confirm 
or refute my still-in-development theory of the open source project lifecycle.  
Last but not least, I have bumped across two Inkscape limitations and I was 
wondering how useful is the Inkscape bug tracker at this point in time:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/775226
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/797164

especially the first one is very much annoying me and I would classify it as 
"critical", but I know too little about the project and its aims to know if 
such a classification would fit the project's vision.  It is surely critical 
for users who manipulate bitmaps in Inkscape, but Inkscape being primarily a 
drawing tool, I am not sure how many users do.  Is there such a thing as an 
Inkscape user survey?

I hope the insights gained from the conversation will be helpful to shape the 
future of Hugin, and maybe of other FLOSS projects as well.

Yuv
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