Where I work, Di is very usable on both MS Windows and Linux.
We currently have only 2 significant usage issues:
1. No way to set default text properties. For text objects, the work-around is easy. For objects with "text fields", like UML shapes, this is more work.
2. The UML Transition shape has a text field with no text properties. This effectively makes diagrams non-portable between computers.
(Yes, I know, we could just label shapes using text objects and group text with the shape, but this makes generating code from diagrams more complex. Also, it introduces another source of potential errors.)
While we can live with those problems, they often require extra work when someone edits another person's diagram.
(We do make fixes to most of the open source tools we use and have attempted to make fixes to Dia. But our area of expertise is electro-mechanical systems, not desktop computer applications and we have very little time available to make more than simple fixes to the open source tools we do use.)
Still, we are happy with Dia and hope it can be updated to Gtk3/Gtk4, and, hopefully, continue to have a small resource footprint.
From: Steve Litt <slitt troubleshooters com>
Subject: What's wrong with Dia the way it is?
What's wrong with Dia just the way it is? It works. It's exportable
into Inkscape for conversion to SVG.
Sure, I have a few qualms with the way Dia works, mainly having to do
with the relationship between text and shapes, but perhaps some good
workaround documentation would settle that. I'd love to have
Visio-quality diagram components, and perhaps if somebody writes some
docs on how to make your own components with the connection points
*you* want, that will be solved. Plus the fact that if everyone
authoring new components puts them together in an online hierarchical
library, perhaps with keyword search, our diagrams could start to rival
those of visio users.
If some of the libraries used by Dia are in the process of being
deprecated, then those certainly must be replaced by their successors.
But other than that, why the emphasis on maintenance? Sometimes
something's so good it needs no more maintenance (fetchmail is one
example).
Right now Dia works for people on all sorts of computers. It's very
DIYable. My experience has been that in many cases, people in a hurry
to "improve" software end up making it into a buggy, DIY-not-allowed
monolithic entanglement.
SteveT
Steve Litt
December 2018 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2018 17:38:05 +0000
From: Zander Brown <zbrown gnome org>
To: discussions about usage and development of dia
<dia-list gnome org>
Subject: Re: Hello Everyone
Message-ID:
<LNXP265MB074554AC9CCF61B8F60489C5DCA80 LNXP265MB0745 GBRP265 PROD OUTLOOK COM>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
On Wed, 2018-12-05 at 12:16 -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Dec 2018 22:24:58 +0000
> Alexander Brown <zbrown gnome org> wrote:
>
> > Whilst I am a member of the GNOME Foundation and would like to see
> > Dia
> > modernised I recognise the fact Dia is very much a cross platform
> > application and therefore has a sort of 'special status' within the
> > GNOME Project and have no intention of breaking KDE/macOS/Windows
> > compatibility
>
> And are you going to guarantee Dia's continued useability for those
> of
> us who run sans-systemd distros? This is an important question
> because
> Gnome itself no longer runs without systemd as its PID1 and early
> boot
> library.
I find it highly unlikely that our main dependencies (Gtk, GLib) will
ever become dependent on systemd and cannot foresee any reason at all
for Dia to depend on systemd itself
As I've stated I'm committed to maintaining support for macOS & Windows
neither of which use systemd so yes I have every intention of
supporting Dia on 'sans-systemd distros'
Hopefully that resolves your concerns
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
> December 2018 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
> https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url="">
> _______________________________________________
> dia-list mailing list
> dia-list gnome org
> https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url="">
> FAQ at
> https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url="">
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> https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url="">
>
--
Zander Brown <zbrown gnome org>
GNOME
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