Forking and building a new version of dia

[Marco van Beek <marco 84andahalf com>]

Hi,

I am a regular user of dia, and am saddened that it is slowly decaying as a project.

I have an idea that might help create a new version with functionality not found in any other system.

I have been documenting a fairly large system and realised how quickly the diagrams will go out of date, just 
because cables get moved, and so on.

So it occurred to me that given the xml data format, it should be reasonably easy to come up with a 
client-server version, using an API on a standard LAMP/WAMP server.

With that in mind, I am happy to put some time into the server side, using apache to do the authentication, 
php to send/receive the XML and images, and MySQL / MariaDB for the database. There would have to be some 
sort of admin interface, and also an easy way to change, for example, that PC21 is now plugged into wall port 
65, and so on. Then every time you need to issue a diagram, all you have to do is load the data from a query, 
and maybe tweak the layout. 

This would also make it multiuser, since people patching could be adding data without the person doing the 
diagrams having to stop work, or do it all themselves.

There may be a system already out there we could tap into with just an API but I am thinking that this could 
be really powerful.

So what do people think? I think we would have to fork the project, but if it is dying anyway that is often 
the easiest way to take control.

Regards,

Marco