[Clipart] openclipart 3.2, bugs, features and changelogs

[shirish शिरीष]

Hi all,
An old bee/user of openclipart ( at least since 2k8 and a bit before).
Please CC me if somebody comments as I have turned off mail from the
mailing list (as I tend to get much mail and hence have been avoiding
to spill under the information overload).  For quite sometime I didn't
see any new release within distributions and hence thought that
everybody had gone home or something. I did use to come to the site
and see some new clipart but more of a desktop person than a browser
kinda person.

Finally though, there was a release today in Debian and came to know
you guys are still good and around :)

$ aptitude show openclipart-png
Package: openclipart-png
State: installed
Automatically installed: yes
Version: 2.0-1
Priority: extra
Section: graphics
Maintainer: Martin Kelly <aomighty at gmail.com>
Uncompressed Size: 655 M
Suggests: gimp
Conflicts: openclipart (< 0.10+dfsg-3)
Description: clip art in PNG format
The Open Clip Art Library is a collection of 100% license-free,
royalty-free, and restriction-free art that you can use for any
purpose.

 This package contains the images in Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.
Homepage: http://www.openclipart.org

Tags: made-of::icons, role::app-data

$ aptitude show openclipart-png=0.18+dfsg-12
Package: openclipart-png
State: not installed
Automatically installed: yes
Version: 0.18+dfsg-12
Priority: extra
Section: graphics
Maintainer: Debian QA Group <packages at qa.debian.org>
Uncompressed Size: 203 M
Suggests: gimp
Conflicts: openclipart (< 0.10+dfsg-3)
Description: clip art in PNG format
 The Open Clip Art Library is a collection of 100% license-free,
royalty-free, and restriction-free art that you can use for any
purpose.

This package contains the images in Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.
Homepage: http://www.openclipart.org

Tags: made-of::icons, role::app-data

As can be seen the packages have tripled in size and there I see a
problem. There is no way for a user as far I can tell to know which
images are new and which images are from the previous release.

what I mean is, while OCAL (openclipart library) is and can be used
almost anywhere, MOST (not all) people might use it to spice their
presentations.

And therein lies number of problems. Now most of them are about a
release around a year or two old so might or might not be relevant.

a. There is no browser :- While I could use some third-party image
browser like eog or/and something else it is difficult to traverse.
While in the short-term I don't think you guys could afford to think
of some sort of browser or something but maybe something to think
about in the medium term. I am thinking something which is specific to
openclipart and the cliparts within (maybe it could be used to see
comments if you are online or/and give feedback or something from
within the image browser interface without using a real browser as
well as connecting or/and learning something about the artist as well
- his motivations and contact details perhaps .) Maybe people can look
at opengameart.org and sort of collaborate and see if something can be
spinned, don't know just an idea.

b. openclipart-libreoffice :- In fact one of the ways if
openclipart-libreoffice is used then you can watch it within
libreoffice > Tools > Gallery although the gallery itself leaves much
to be desired. The info. about the package shows openclipart homepage
so guess you are the guys maintaining that extension/add-on for
libreoffice. Is there a roadmap for the next release of the tool, I
may have some some ideas or maybe just take a look at what's cooking.

c. Naming :- The biggest problem I found while going through the
collections is the naming, rather than naming the collections from
functional or descriptive point of view they are named
contributor-wise. This is horrible waste of the user's time as he's
not going to crawl through the whole archive to look for an image
which he knows about but cannot find in the current scenario. Maybe
tagging and some sort of interface to search (maybe ties with a.)

d.Changelog :- From the package sizes I was able to infer that there
is new material but because of an absence of changelog I was unable to
know what new categories or ideas have made in this release. Maybe
some sort of changelog could be thought about. I know that while
having changelogs made when people code in a VCS is trivial maybe
something similar could be done when new collections are released
(don't know). Either way more information would be good.

e. In many cases it is also painful to figure out who the author is
and what (if any) contact details of the artist are.

f. libpng 0.15 :- Would the team needs to concern itself with the new
libpng library in anyway ? http://libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html

I do know that at least debian is gonna do a huge libpng transition
pretty soon which will translate to other debian-derivatives as well.

http://release.debian.org/transitions/html/libpng1.5.html

g. While I did see a donate button, I didn't see a donate page. It
might be a good idea to put up a donate page and actually put some
sort of price to some of the higher priority features . I know that
the idea is to remain non-profit but having something for people to
shoot for is perhaps good for the short-term as well as long-term.
Maybe something can be worked out for both the developers who are
working behind it as well as the artist.

h. Social media :- I do see there has been some sort of half-hearted
attempt to use twitter but perhaps having diaspora would be better as
much of the audience within diaspora (http://joindiaspora.com) would
be welcoming about openclipart and maybe be of help in developing
somethings.

Overall while its good that such a resource like OCAL is there and you
have ideas of putting new release, it sad in someways to see such a
wonderful not being able to use in the most optimum way.

Btw I did not talk about svg port simply for the fact that its double the size.

$ aptitude show openclipart-svg
Package: openclipart-svg
State: not installed
Version: 2.0-1
Priority: extra
Section: graphics
Maintainer: Martin Kelly <aomighty at gmail.com>
Uncompressed Size: 1,107 M
Recommends: librsvg2-bin
Suggests: ksvg, gimp-svg, inkscape, sodipodi, sketch
Conflicts: openclipart (< 0.10+dfsg-3)
Description: clip art in SVG format
 The Open Clip Art Library is a collection of 100% license-free,
royalty-free, and restriction-free art that you can use for any
purpose.

 This package contains the images in Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG)
format, which is an XML format approved by the W3C.
Homepage: http://www.openclipart.org

Tags: made-of::icons, made-of::svg, role::app-data

I do know though that there are benefits of SVG vs PNG as well.

Now I could have probably put up some tickets on launchpad but didn't
know if all of this makes sense or not. Maybe its better to shoot the
breeze atm and if people see something worthwhile then will put up the
tickets.

Till l8er.
-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
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