[Clipart] roadmap planning please help

[Ted Gould]

On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 23:14 -0700, Jon Phillips wrote:
> Please dream and add tasks to the roadmap. We shouldn't overload
> ourselves too much, but if there are some simple tasks that seem doable
> by yourself and/or you'd like to see done, please add them and lightly
> put your name at the end of the task that you want to do...no pressure!
> Remember, this is supposed to be fun! :)

I don't think I'm involved enough to add things to the Wiki, but I
wanted to throw out a couple ideas.

I downloaded the Debian packages, both the SVG and the PNG ones, and
they're huge.  In many ways that's a huge complement to a project that I
never thought would get this big, but I'm worried that it makes the
whole thing somewhat unusable for many users (dial-up especially).  So,
here are a couple of ideas on solving that:

- Could the PNG package be generated from the SVG files?  Make it have
dependencies of librsvg-bin or Inkscape and then you could download the
SVG package and generate all the PNGs.  This would make for a smaller
download.  Personally, I don't mind the space on my hard drive as much
as the bandwidth.

- Break the packages out by rating.  So have package for every major
number group (4-5, 3-4, etc.) and then make the main package a
meta-package that downloads all of them.  It would make it so that
people could get a smaller grab if they wanted.

A slight clean up thing is that I don't think the author names should be
in the file names.  I think it is just confusing.  I don't want to loose
that information, because I think the authors are important, but I think
many users will get confused by it.  So, what I'm proposing is having a
"AUTHORS" file in every directory with their names in it.  It's not as
good, but I think it does make it fairly easy to find out where credit
is due.

On the project perspective I wonder if it isn't at the point that people
like Adobe and Corel could be talked to about possibly including much of
the artwork on their installation DVDs.  Seriously.  It's free for them,
perhaps there can be some sort of branding, I'd love to see the OCAL
logo on the outside of the Illustrator box ;)  Xara may be a good
target, well, depending on where they're going.

On a similar note, I wonder if anyone has the development tools for
building Illustrator plugins.  Do something similar to the GSoC project
Inkscape has this summer for saving and opening from a ccHost instance.
I don't know if Adobe would donate the dev. tools (I imagine there is
some sort of API license or something) for a project like that.  Maybe
they would have an summer intern they could donate also?

Okay, that's my brain dump.  All ideas are public domain, modify and use
as you wish ;)

		--Ted

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