Re: Diashapes 0.2.2 released

[Steffen Macke <sdteffen gmail com>]

Thomas, Roland, Martin,

thanks for your feedback.

I understand your points and I'm not opposed to distributing shapes in
packages.
However, there are some more things to consider:

* Diashapes and the Dia Shape Repository should make the shape creators
more prominent - they
are an important part of the Dia community
* Dia is a cross-platform thing, packaging would require Windows, Mac OS
X and several Linux packages. Any volunteers to build and maintain those
packages?
* Diashapes and the Diashapes repository drastically speed up the
publishing process compared to a packaging approach
* I guess the ordinary first time Dia user is just overwhelmed by the
amount of sheets and shapes
installed. Further increasing that number will not help him. He might be
better off browsing the shape repository and the example diagrams or
search for shapes online and then select the sheets he really needs
without cluttering his "sheetspace"
* The average quality of shapes in the shape repository is somewhat
lower than the ones shipping with Dia itself. While we're very cautious
about shape updates in Dia breaking backwards compatibility, my
understanding is that there is more room to correct/improve the shapes
in the Dia Shape Repository.
 
> So :
> 1) a dia-shapes-extra would be great, and a general
> /var/lib/dia/{shapes,sheets} (possibly rsynced or foreign host
> mounted) path would be greater to share shapes and sheets between users.
I've started to create a dia-additional-shapes package for those Shapes
in the Dia Shape Repository:

http://dia-installer.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=dia-installer/dia-additional-shapes;a=summary

It's not complete, though.

Regards,

Steffen