[Clipart] help for the project (at least next release)

[Fernando Guerin]

Firstly I have to say that this is a great job done by the artists and the group of
developers that maintain this project.
(oh... excuse my english and please read all before commenting something)

Some days ago I started viewing all the project, firstly looking for some package, and
here are some things that I come up with (mostly thinking on the creation of a package).

By all I have readed I sense that you want to put all the graphics in the next release
and I think its a mistake, its somehow imposible. From my point of view the project, or
lets say the subproject of releasing a package, should take tiny steps, one by one. Now
it haves a new engine and its like starting from the begining again and there is a lot to
do.

The problem of releasing a package are:
- Develop the tools to create the package with the new engine.
- Import the old package graphics to the new engine
- Develop a tool so the user can find easyly the wanted graphic in the library (locally)

The first one is the more important, because without this there is no package. But here
there is not only the problem of putting the graphics into an archive, there are the
problems of selecting the graphics and making a directory structure. So I came with this
idea:
Selecting and categoring tool
This could be done just with tags. There should be special tags only for the
packager/admin. This tags will build the directory structure, no object should belong to
more than one package tag (must be a restriction of the system), so that no duplicates
are created in the package. There should be some way to create the subdirectories
(subtypes), may be some relation between tags, for example: birds -> animals, easter ->
holiday -> recreation. With this we can have the graphics that are unsorted (not in the
package) and the sorted ones with the subtypes (with a package tag), and the packager can
change this package tags.
I think this could be done really easy and start to "build" the package before the
packing tool is develop.

Including the old package graphics I think its not so important, but necessary. What I
mean is that there should be a work towards the inclusion of these, but without
compromising the releasing of the packages. Here is what I say before, take tiny steps,
release a good package (usefull and usable) with the graphics that in the moment you can.
The job to include the old graphics is a only once job, and you had problems creating a
tool to do this automaticly. So why dont do this manually? With one person uploading 10
graphics a day, we could have 300 in a month and its a good number. In a medum term this
task should be finished.
And here arises the problem, that I have read in the archives, of what to do with the
ownership. If the graphic cant be moved to the owner that is requesting that ownership,
there could be something done, but its not a clean process. The ownership will be of a
virtual user, for example "old_packages" and the name of the graphis should be
itsname+something, so that the owner can upload it. In the description will be the
original author and when the autor uploads agains it, it should be marked to be deleted.

And for the last is the searching tool. This is more a request, but because of the huge
quantity of graphics its really necessary. What I am thinking of is something like the
tagsearch that is online. There should be at least a library (software) with some methods
to help in this matter. I would use all the tags to create some sort of index/database. I
would add something thats its not now online (could be done) and is creating types of
tags. Like this:
+archive: .svg .jpeg .png ...
+content: animals, sports, people, man ...
+type: realistic, cartoon, ...
+rating: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, >1 >2 >3 >4
And thinking more into the future (if this is implemented), the user could set his own
tags and types of tags.

Hope to be of some help, Fernando.


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