[evince] Fwd: Kickstarter campaign for annotation support in evince and poppler-glib

["jose aliste gmail com" <jose aliste gmail com>]

Replying to the list now. 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: jose aliste gmail com <jose aliste gmail com>
Date: Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 9:27 PM
Subject: Re: Kickstarter campaign for annotation support in evince and poppler-glib
To: Martin Spacek <gmane mspacek mm st>

Hi Martin, 

my answers are below, 

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 8:49 PM, Martin Spacek <gmane mspacek mm st> wrote:

Hello Jose Alliste and the evince and poppler lists,

Somehow, I wasn't notified of replies to my rant on bugzilla about annotation support in evince, back in January:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=692655#c16

Jose, you replied:

> You are welcome to provide patches/start campaigns, etc, to get annotation
> support into Evince. This is a volunteer project and we use any help we can
> get (and if we can't use it, you are always free to fork, evince is gpl)
>
> Anyway, this is deviating from the issue. We can continue the conversation
> privately if you want/need so.( jose.aliste at gmail.com)

I wish I could provide patches. I certainly have the motivation: I'm bothered by the lack of full annotation support on an almost daily basis. But, I have no experience with glib, only very minimal experience with big C/C++ projects, and no time to devote to changing that situation. I'm a Python man, and way past due finishing up my PhD. But I was serious about putting some money into a Kickstarter (or Indiegogo?) campaign.

I can think of least a few issues that would have to be resolved before a fundraising campaign could get off the ground:

Issue #1: what might a Kickstarter campaign promise exactly? Acrobat Pro, PDF Xchange, or Foxit -like support for adding, editing, and saving annotations back to the open PDF, with some of the more basic tools, like highlighting, text annots (box and free), and drawing available on a toolbar, in the menu bar and context menu, and perhaps via keyboard shortcuts? Different cursor icons for different annotation tools?

Text Annotations are already there. There are some basic bugs to fix before highlighting can be added, but that are more of implementation details... I believe you could do your campaign in term of features, like having highlighting support... having multimedia support, etc. and assign some bounties... I don't know, it's up to you. I also know that sometimes people are contracted from some companies with gnome knowledge to do some work. (See planet.gnome.org for some recent news about some funded-driven developments)

 

 

Issue #2: who would promise to do the work, and therefore get paid? What kind of timeline might we expect? Ideally, a currently volunteering senior dev or devs, with plenty of experience with the code base, would devote themselves to it full-time for a consecutive period, and get paid only if certain features land by a certain time.

That's the issue actually. Currently we have some new contributors and therefore maybe among them the will be someone interested in claiming a bounty. 

 

Issue #3: what should the total minimum pledged amount be?

Again I would go by bounties, it seems easier to manage. Or you can try contacting people/companies and see how much they would ask and try to raise this money... I have no idea really just thinking outloud (and just my personal impression) ;)

 

Issue #4: how would we resolve conflicts between the stated goals of a potential Kickstarter campaign, and the opinions of existing devs that aren't employed by the campagin?

Well, evince maintainers are  Carlos García and Christian Persch, So  at the end, the code must have his/their  approval. I don't see any problem or conflict in the way things work currently... Like, the code must be merged in order to claim the bounty, and thus you need to pass through the normal review process. 

 

Obviously, the main single reward for all levels of monetary contributions would be full PDF annotation support in evince and poppler-glib. Maybe another reward level could be special mention in the About box, listed in decreasing order of contribution, above a certain minimum amount.

However, my biggest worry is that GNOME has been going down the path of removing tried and true UI components, like menu bars and toolbars, all seemingly for the sake of change, with an air that the GNOMEs know best, users be damned, and that giving the (power-ish) user some flexibility and customizability are somehow a bad thing. Before you ask for references, whether the preceding sentence is true or not is irrelevant. The perception among users is very real.

Sure, the perception among some of the developers also :) In the long-term evince will become more and more complete, we don't plan on removing more features. The only feature we have removed is the editable toolbars, which was a pain in the ass from the accessibility point of view... and now that evince 3.10 will come with really good accessibility, it was a trade-off. Btw, I believe that people doing the accesibility work are being paid to work on evince and it's working alright. It was like that on early accesibility support which was paid by the Junta de Andalucia

 

Greets

José

 

So, I worry that a Kickstarter campaign for evince and poppler-glib might be good money and good intentions chasing the wrong project. But, I'd very much like to be proven wrong. The point with a Kickstarter campaign is that users could put their money where their mouths are, and speak in a voice that's a lot harder to dismiss (assuming they can come to some kind of consensus on a desired feature set, at least for annotations).

As I stated in the bug report, I'm willing to personally commit US$200 towards annotation support in evince, assuming the above issues can be hammered out. More importantly, I'm absolutely certain that countless other academics, especially those in the harder sciences which are more likely to run Linux, would be equally willing to contribute monetary support. There would be many places to advertise such a campaign, and I think it could be very successful, since the audience is so large. Then of course, non-academic Linux users would also find full annotation support useful - perhaps not as desperately so as academic users, but they'd provide a vastly bigger pool of potential contributors.

Thoughts?

--
Martin Spacek
gmane-at-mspacek-dot-mm-dot-st
http://mspacek.github.io/