Re: Maintaining / Helping out on Dia

[Zander Brown <zbrown gnome org>]

On Tue, 2018-12-04 at 22:20 -0500, Alejandro Imass wrote:

On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 6:12 PM Thomas HARDING <tom thomas-harding name> wrote:

Hi, all !

So,

Le 04/12/2018 à 11:21, Eduard Nicodei via dia-list a écrit :

 

So, I think that's a good start point : why Dia, an unmaintained
software, has *no* competitor /on its segment/ ?

DIA is very unique I give you that. But draw.io is a huge risk for DIA and similar programs, and that's just naming one.

 

Sure draw.io is probably our main 'competitor' but I believe there is space for both (and we do slightly different things)

[...]

Obviously, Dia could _also_ work networked, in the future, or produce
fancy views, MS-Visio like, when you need to impress commercials (we can
imagine a toggle button "turn on fancy"), or at option use/produce other
data structures such as Json.

But keep in scope to keep the tool simple, stupid and powerfull.

Yeah these things are important. But there are other problems. For example, GTK2 is completely obsolete. GTK 3 was released in 2011. I mean, seriously? 

The port to GTK3 is probably not straightforward (and never mind 4 which should be quickly approaching) , so again, IMHO it would be a good time to re-think where people want to take this project. 

Having played with such a port on various occasions the main blocker is rendering, Currently we still use Gdk to render just about everything but that was deprecated by the end of the 2x cycle and removed in 3. If we can rework the rendering to use Cairo (via https://developer.gnome.org/gdk2/stable/gdk2-Cairo-Interaction.html) whilst still targeting Gtk2 then much of the work is about using getters instead of direct access (gtk_toggle_button_get_active(toggle) instead of toggle->active) and find replacing removed symbols

Obviously this would result in a Dia full of depreciation warnings but we have them already on Gtk2

The Gtk3 -> 4 transition should be much smoother, just a bit monotonous

I have heard of people suggesting to use JSX for GTK 4, so not sure why the "shit" comment about React earlier. In fact, React would probably be the best bet of survival or rebirth for DIA. But heck what do I know, right ?

That's more of a general play with GObject and is unrelated to Gtk4 (And nobody is seriously suggesting we scrap Dia and start again in _javascript_ are they?)

Best,

Alex

 

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-- 

Zander Brown <zbrown gnome org>
GNOME

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