Re: Maintaining / Helping out on Dia

[Michael Ross <michael e ross gmail com>]

I believe that Steffen (managed producing a windows installer) and Hans Breuer (who was the main decision maker about the direction of development) have passed on to their next incarnation. I think Tomas was suggesting to contact Gnome personnel.  Ownership of the project is locked up and we need to get a new owner defined.

Many people agree that Dia is worth more development, but there is this bureaucratic impediment that must be solved. 

 

There is a full archive of past posting to this list and there was some method that the developers used for communication that was not exposed to the public.  These would be very instructive to review.  One of the reasons for the success of Dia was a fairly strict development path that kept the code light and efficient.  There was always a care to let the users find workarounds in preference to producing elaborate, but single purpose functions.  A lot of effort went into interfacing.

If you look through past Dia list postings you can see how many people would take up using the program and without living with it for very long, then start demanding enhancements (without any willingness to participate in code development).  A common result of opensource in a corporate code world.  Hans would fend off these requests if there was an existent workaround.  I think this was a good philosophy.

I have been using Dia since the early 2000's.  I don't write code so I do what I can with it as it is and find other solutions when needed.  Inkscape and GIMP are good partner tools.   

The day will come when I can't get whatever OS Microsoft puts out to work with Dia. So I hope some folks will take up caring for DIa again.  I will only be able to run 32 bit programs for a limited time I fear.

 Mike

On Sun, Dec 2, 2018 at 12:38 PM Eduard Nicodei via dia-list <dia-list gnome org> wrote:

Hi All,

I know this has been asked before but I would like to voice my support as well.

I saw Tomas Pospisek's (CC'ed) message on the Dia mailing list some time ago about maintaining Dia and getting fixes merged into upstream ("Doing some work on Dia").  I was wondering if Tomas or anybody else had time to get in touch with Gnome developers / maintainers?

As I replied on the list to a previous email last month, I find it a shame that such a useful piece of software is without active development.

In the original "Doing some work on Dia" email, Tomas mentioned:

Anyway, if anybody wants to help:

* triaging bugs
* providing patches or testing patch
* going through dia forks [3] and extracting useful things

I could help out with any of those (been coding in C for more than 10 years) - at the current time I can only guarantee a few minutes here and there, though I definitely want to get involved.  I was wondering though if I could go about these in a prioritised / structure manner?  Or rather what would be the most helpful?

Also I'm guessing at the moment there is no real roadmap, etc?  Would it be useful first to come up with one?  I'm open to discussion on the dia mailing list or IRC channels (though would prefer offline discussion via email / gitlab issues).

Tomas Harding also suggested getting in touch with the authors directly, the only email I could find was Steffen Macke's (CC'ed) or even with the Gnome Bugmaster (also CC'ed).

In any case, I would be really happy to see development on Dia resume :-)

Thank you all for the great work done on Dia everyone!

Best Wishes,

Eduard

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Michael E. Ross

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