I don't think we need to argue.  Alejandro's comment however raises an
important issue: "what are Dia's competitors"?

I think actually Dia can live alongside online diagram editors such as
draw.io and formats such as XML/SVG have nothing to do with it.

The reason why I have used dia in the past is that I could not find any
other solution for the following requirements:

- be fully offline (draw.io & co fail this - plus I'm not trusting them
with any work-sensitive material!)
- is free, open source and is not controlled by a company (yEd fails this -
also OmniGraffle, Enterprise Architect, Visual Paradigm, etc)
- simple, does not require learning a new language (graphviz and any other
text->UML tools fail this)
- lightweight, but still fairly rich in features (libreoffice draw fails
the lightweight requirement)
- offers a simple interface which is very easy to pick up (I tried
Inkscape, but for whatever reason I was never able to get working as fast
as I could in Dia)
- portable: works on Windows (my main requirement), *BSDs and maybe others.

I might be heavily biased towards Dia, but I have searched for a better
alternative since I knew it wasn't being maintained and couldn't find one.
Hoping I have not missed anything?

I think there will always be a need for an offline, open source, portable
lightweight diagram SW, so I think Dia still has a lot of life left in it.
Also it is nice to see that it is still top-search result for anything like
"diagram open software", "diagram software linux" even after so many years.

Hope this helps,
Ed




On Mon, 3 Dec 2018, 18:42 Andrey Repin via dia-list <dia-list@gnome.org
wrote:

> Greetings, Alejandro Imass!
>
> > IMHO maybe a fork is required to take DIA to the next level and separate
> it
> > from GNOME even if you decide to keep using GTK and move to 3 or
> whatever.
> > More than the actual graphics library I would look into taking the things
> > that are really valuable from the current code and perhaps think of a
> > complete re-write with React, Anguar, Ember or whatever. I would get out
> of
> > XML and go to JSON and re-write the app into a React front-end with a
> > corresponding backend and API. IMHO the greatest long term existential
> > threat to DIA is not Visio or Omnigraffle, it's draw.io
>
> Sounds so much NIH, I don't even want to start arguing.
> XML (specifically SVG) is a solid base. You can do wonders with it, all
> that
> is needed is an improvement in rendering (handling) of shapes.
>
> There's very little need to be changed, only moved forward in the basically
> same direction it has been always moving.
>
> All your fancy "Angular, React, and shit" are just overgrown,
> uncontrollable shit.
>
>
> --
> With best regards,
> Andrey Repin
> Monday, December 3, 2018 21:31:34
>
> Sorry for my terrible english...
>
> _______________________________________________
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> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dia-list
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> Main page at http://live.gnome.org/Dia
>
>
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