[Clipart] Open Clip Art Library 0.07 Release

[Nathan Eady]

Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> I thought the keywords would be used to avoid the need to generate
> directories and that a browser/search tools would be built on top of it

For the site, yes.  However, the releases at this time just contain
images, not the tools for managing them.

> that applications would be expected to have their own systems of managing
> and sorting through lots of extra add-ons.

Ultimately, it would be nice if applications such as OpenOffice and so
forth could use a clipart package without redundant copies, leaving it
packed up in a zipfile, but storing maybe an index into it (based on
the keywords, or on some XML we generate from the keywords, the DMS,
whatever) and use that index for finding/sorting the images.

But that is something that would have to be taken up with the developers
of each application (or, someone could write a generalized library for
it and different apps could use that, but I tend to dislike that
approach for C/C++ apps since it leads to dynamic linking and thence
unto nightmarish dependency trees, wherein the user ends up needing
to compile a newer X server just to install the latest Firefox,
because that version of XFree86 from two years ago doesn't have some
extension needed by the other library that the latest and greatest
Pango requires, whatever Pango is, and that old version of Pango
isn't good enough for GTK2 -- so I tend to prefer that C/C++ apps
implement or bundle their own libraries).

> But maybe that will happen in future! (I'm being optimistic).

The future is a long-term proposition, so lots of things are possible.

> For an application like Inkscape to manage the huge amount of clipart
> available from OpenClipart.org it would need to write a basic File Manager
> like interface to do it properly.  It is unfortunate that Inkscape the
> biggest potential user of OpenClipArt.org does not really have a suitable
> system for managing large amounts of files.
> 
> Perhaps instead a developer might be interested to develop a more generic
> "Clipart-App" that unlike Nautilus would be portable and although
> resembling a file manager it would provide a more abstract view of
> collections/albums rather than a literal filesystem view.

That sounds like the job for a completely separate project, well
outside the scope of the Open Clip Art Library.