Re: Intro and Questions

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Rudye McGlothlin wrote:
> Hello Everybody,
>
> I was really excited to find Dia.  So, I'd like to do my part to help
> with the development.

That's great!  We can always use more people.

> In particular, I'd like to help with the Windows version and the ER
> palette.  Who should I talk to and what suggests do people have for
> getting involved? 

The first step would be to compile Dia.  Since you're on Windows, it's a
little more involved than just autogen&&make.  Steffan Macke and Hans
Breuer may be able to help you (and a log of your efforts would be
appreciated).  Compiling off the CVS may be a bit more complicated, as some
of the dependencies are fairly new, but there's been some changes in the
transition to GTK 2.0 that make it difficult to take patches for the 0.90
sources. 

> Also, where can I get more information about how the
> XML document is formed after making a diagram with the ER palette?  

Apart from the DTD, there is little documentation on the XML format.  I
have some notes I'm going to put on the TWiki
<URL:http://faemalia.org/wiki/view/Technical/DiaEditor>.

> I'd
> like to be able to write a schema to convert the Dia produced file to a
> schema for a MySQL database.

For this, I suggest you look at Tedia2SQL
<URL:http://tedia2sql.tigris.org> or the other SQL-generating programs
listed on the Dia site.  That particular wheel has been reinvented many
times. 

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?