Re: Forking and building a new version of dia

[Steve Litt <slitt troubleshooters com>]

I was going thru my email a little too fast and thought I was on the
Inkscape list and responded thusly. Yeah, I've always thought Dia has
some problems, but still maintain the way to approach this client
server Dia would be a separate part, not a fork of the project. And the
way to make Dia better is to pitch in, not to fork it, unless you have
access to ten or so gung-ho developers ready to do the job.

SteveT


On Mon, 16 Jul 2018 02:52:02 -0400
Steve Litt <slitt troubleshooters com> wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Jul 2018 17:15:29 +0100
> Marco van Beek <marco 84andahalf com> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am a regular user of dia, and am saddened that it is slowly
> > decaying as a project.  
>
> The opinion of a man whose first post to this list in at least 5 years
> asks for others to desert Inkscape and join him in a fork. Not say
> "how can I help?", but ask others to desert. And just for the record,
> I've never thought of Inkscape as "decaying": It works great for me.
>
> > 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 quickly the diagrams will go out of date, just because cables get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.  
>
> Now you see, what you could have done was offered to add your lampwamp
> to the existing Inkscape so it becomes a nice, modular tool. I think
> that would have created more interest.
>
> > With that in mind, I am happy to put some time into the server side,
> > using apache to do the authentication,   
>
> Put some time in? You'd better get ready to treat it as almost a
> fulltime job: Forks are brutal. I know you wouldn't expect your
> co-forkers to carry the load while you just "put some time into".
> Would you?
>
> > 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.  
>
> I'm not sure how valuable a multiuser Inkscape would be, and of course
> if it's stored uncompressed another possibility would be for
> everyone to use git on the drawing. But the real problem here is that,
> the way you've approached this list on your very first contact, I
> doubt you'd be a credible project leader.
>
> SteveT
>  
> Steve Litt
> Author: The Key to Everyday Excellence
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/key
> Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt
>
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