[CREATE] Inkscape questions

[Liam R E Quin]

On Sun, 2011-06-19 at 13:11 -0400, Yuval Levy wrote:

> 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 don't see a discrepancy.  The first report is not about open vs closed
bugs, it's about new vs "triaged" bugs - i.e. whether or not the bugs
have been categorised and identified as bugs.

Note also that Inkscape is not in fact an Ubuntu-only project.


> 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",

If no-one else has commented on it my guess would be that not many other
people are in that position.  It often happens that one person, or a few
people, are unable to use a particular program at all (a "critical"
bug).  The solutions for them are generally one or more of...
(1) fix the bug and submit the fix as a patch (this is the Open Source
Way)
(2) hire or bribe a programmer to fix the bug and submit the fix as a
patch
(3) persuade one or more active developers on th project that the bug
should be fixed, or if it it's easy, that you'll go away if it's
fixed :-)
(4) use a different program

For (3), which you are trying to do, you typically need to become part
of the project community -- anything from hanging out for a while in
their IRC channel (or possibly Jabber for inkscape) to contributing to
the project, e.g. artwork, tutorials, resources, in a way that can be
used immediately (e.g. posting tutorials on existing forums)

In this particular case, though, it's hard to rotate a bitmap except by
multiples of 90 degrees and not lose sharpness or detail, and it's hard
to scale a bitmap, especially trying to make it larger as you're then
asking the computer program to add detail on the fly.

You might find the gimp does a better job at these two tasks than
Inkscape.  My guess would be that a good architectural approach might be
for Inkscape to use the babl and gegl libraries to rotate and scale
bitmaps for export to png, wit appropriate box filters, but there would
still be problems with shapness if you took a 100x100 pixel image and
scaled it to be 500x500 pixels in the rendered output, or if you tried
to rotate a bitmap image by (say) 3.5 degrees.

> 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.

I've only tried to address your specific questions.

Open Source projects do of course have life cycles, and often do end up
abandoned, or get merged into some other project or taken over, or the
goals of the developers change and the program mutates to do something
entirely different.  I'm not closely involved with Inkscape, but as far
as I can tell it's being actively developed; the version I have here was
released in February 2011, and I see from the Inkscape.org that the
development version just got a new feature as of this June.

To some extent each project has its own culture. This is part of what
makes a conference like LGM so exciting.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.barefootliam.org