[CREATE] Inkscape questions

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Yuval Levy wrote:

> I need a historical perspective.
>
> 1. has the project become more popular / received massively more bug reports
> in 2011 than in 2008?

Can't say for sure.

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

Yes. See below.

> 3. who was responsible for the stellar 2008 performace of bringing down the
> count of untriaged bugs to less than 100?

When we moved from SF to Launchpad, there was an active team of half a
dozen of people (at least) who worked on it.

>  are these people still around? still active?

Only few.

> 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?

The kind of tracker has nothing to do with amount of bugfixes.

> 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?

2007-2008 was when last people from the initial team gradually stopped
contributing. We never completely recovered since then. Of the old
crew only Jon Cruz is around (some of the old team is working on 2geom
library, our side project). Right now we are down to just few people
who actually fix bugs and several GSoC students who have became
regular contributors. Bugs triaging is done by mostly one bugfixer and
another person who isn't developer.

> 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

Wrong tool. Use Scribus.

1. Create a new page with frames for images.
2. Group those frames.
3. Send this group to scrapbook.
4. Drag this group from scrapbook on every new page.

Note that you can create different compositions of frames and save
them all in your scrapbook, then just drag onto canvas whichever you
need at the moment.

As for sharpening, nothing prevents you from doing selective
sharpening on just the images you need. This is what both bitmap
filters (ImageMagick based) and SVG filters are for.

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

Can't comment on this one much.

> 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.

Some smarter interpolation methods like those that keep penetrating
GEGL thanks to Nicolas and Adam would be nice indeed. However unsharp
mask and co. are always the last word, interpolation regardless. You
have it in Inkscape already.

> Is there such a thing as an Inkscape user survey?

Not that I know of. I think we shall do one later this year. However,
as you will surely understand, given how few developers we have
around, some kind of survey might indeed help us understand things,
but won't help us do much about it.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org