moving lines with shapes

[Aaron Trevena <tj love warhead org uk>]

a major bug bear of mine and many people I have spoken to is the lack of
intelligence in lines. ie they stay attached to shapes, but don't follow
them.

This can greatly increase the amount of time taken to do a serious
diagram, and particaulraly in my case removes some of the benefit of
automatic the shape and line creation.

is anybody working on some more intelligence in lines so they 'follow'
shapes? or is it in 0.88 which I have yet to download?

If not I may write something simple to try and find the locations of teh
two connection points, which I assume are properties of teh line anyway
and work out if the line is within a box bounded by the two connection
points as corners.

i.e.
   -------------
   |           |
---|---        |
   |  |        |
  .|..|........|.
---x---        |.
  .            |.
  .        ----x----
  .........|.....  |
           |       |
           ---------

shouldn't occur as the line is outside the box represented by the
dots. Would it be wrong to try and add some logic to ensure that each time
a shape attached to a line moves then the line shecks that it is still
within the box boudned by its connections?

This relatively simple feature (to the opuitsider looking in at
least) would make a huge difference to visio usability. I'd be happy to
code it if somebody gave me some big pointers on where and how to start
and what to look out for. Dia is a bit big for me to master most of its
code in order to just fix line behaviour, and I'm hoping that my current
extra freetime (did I mention I was looking for work) will be somewhat
less in the near future.

regards,

A.