On Tue, 1 May 2001, Aaron Trevena wrote:
> On Tue, 1 May 2001, Hans Breuer wrote:
>
>> - work on all major platforms, (Does this include Gnome 1.4;
>> anyone using Gnome 1.4 out there ?)
>> - make available all the bugfixes since the last official
>> version (Dia 0.86 has had some serious problems with some
>> menu actions, see: Objects/Align/Equal Distance thread.
>> Are there any *users* out there ?)
>> - contain less bugs/more features than the previous release
>> - silence complaining about bugs, which got fixed month ago
>> - be localized properly ?
>
> I think one of the biggest features would be increasing extensibility or
> providing more and easier to find documentation on extending dia, be it
> plugins or tools that work along side Dia.
Yes, better organization of sheets and stuff would be neat-o.
> but thats just me because I never want to use Visio again, actually I
> never want to use any diagram prgram again I want it all to work
> magically thru perl scripts and xml and mind reading, but one step at a
> time :)
I almost got my coworker here to write the mind-reading plugin:)
> as for releasing early and often - thats what CVS is for amongst the
> other good points hans makes.
No, CVS is for the developers. Having to point non-developers at the CVS
version is IMHO a sign of lack of frequent enough releases. Most
importantly, distributions and the like should never pick from CVS (see
what happened to RedHat and gcc), but should be able to include a recent
version.
> One of the things that makes a software project more dynamic is having
> making it more accesable through plugins and api's and documentation that
> mean people can pick it up and start hacking. I'd love to hack dia but my
> C isn't too hot, hence me doing automagic with Dia's XML using perl,
> having an API or a way to do perl plugins would make a huge difference.
Let me put it this way: What do you want to be able to do from perl? Just
create more objects, or more than that?
> finally thanks to the Dia developers and maintainers for doing things the
> right way - the XML file format is really useful - I am using it to
> create UML class diagrams in perl and now I'm parsing the xml into
> text/html documentation as well. I know of a bunch of other projects that
> taking the xml and doing cool stuff with it like dia2sql.
Thanks for that go to Alex -- he did a very cool design right from the
start, including the split between app, lib and objects.
> Anyone got any thoughts on Graphviz - it does automagic layout, don't
> know how much use or interest it would be to the Dia developers? I am
> planning to make my code work with both Dia and Graphviz.
I believe the Graphviz stuff is under a rather more restrictive license.
-Lars
--
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause) | H�rdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I | Retainer of Sir Kegg
will defend to the death your right to say it." | of Westfield
--Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire | Chaos Berserker of Khorne
