Re: Diashapes 0.2.2 released

[Roland Stigge <stigge antcom de>]

Hi Steffen,

thanks for your thoughts!

On 08/26/2010 08:00 PM, Steffen Macke wrote:
> > 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:

My biggest concern is not the way how we distribute the shapes but how
to make sure that additional shapes can manage to keep dia files using
them compatible, i.e. how to use them transparently without people
needing to synchronize with external shape repositories when getting dia
files from "friends".

That's one reason for packaging the shapes or shipping with original dia.

Regarding additional shape collections "polluting" the shape-space -
maybe we could have an additional sub-sub menu containing those, to
separate them from official dia shapes, e.g. "Other sheets" -> "Extra"
-> "..."

Further, I often read the opinion that by providing the open shape
interface, we empower users to create their own shapes. In practice, I
observe that only a very small percentage of users actually "draw" their
own shapes - they are no vector graphics designers and won't even find
the diashapes installer themselves if I don't give them a hint.

Regarding the concern that additional shapes create package bloat: The
currently freely available sheets are ~120k, whereas dia is ~8900k, both
gzip compressed. That's only about 1.3 percent growth... :-)

Thanks,

bye,
  Roland