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

Sat Sep 1 20:26:49 PDT 2007

On Sat, 2007-09-01 at 17:15 -0300, Fernando Guerin wrote:
> 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)

Thanks and all is well!

> 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.

Interesting idea...there are both user tags and system tags in the
tagging system. I would love to see this idea fleshed out more, but I'm
thinking now we should offer the *capability* for people to make
packages and we just release one official package that is limited in
size and quality...the other idea is we could just spawn off the whole
package creation process to get others to do this, however, the package
downloads are most of our traffic, so probably best to keep official
packages in house. Also, our package is in in every major distro, so
good to release more...

> 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.

Interesting idea. All of the clip art is public domain, so, we could
just package away without authors names...this is an interesting idea,
to only release packages of the newest, possibly monthly or quarterly,
but this does not fit how packages work on package management systems,
where the new version replaces the old...in the end, we have to face tha
the old way of accessing packages doesn't scale super well, compared to
software...anyway, so much is moving to the web anyway, so we have to
consider how people will use the service...I'm putting my money that
ppl. will just come to the site and/or use a service in apps like
Inkscape, etc, to get the clip art rather needing a huge
package...anyway, still like idea of providing ;)

> 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.

Cool, these are all great ideas Fernando...it would be great for you to
flesh them out more on our wiki, discuss here and even better, help
implement some of these ideas...we have tons of ideas, but are low on
committers right now, so just need simple steps towards a release...so,
if you can solve some of these problems with bite-sized solutions and
mark them off our roadmap towards 0.19, then please do so....

Keep up the discussion and lets get 0.19 out!

Jon

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