[Skencil-users] Join forces for skencil1/sK1?

[Bernhard Herzog]

Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de> writes:

> I wrote:
>> > I am also copying Bernhard (H.) as he probably will be interested in the
>> > discussion as well and he knows most of the reasons why he wanted to move
>> > to GTK (and GNOME originally if I remember).
>
> Bernhard (H.) will be back this monday...

Well, I have been back from my holiday since last monday, but I don't
have much time for Skencil.  I've been moving houses in my vacation and
as a result I don't have a good workspace at home at the moment and I
didn't have much time for Skencil during the vacation either.  I did
have some time to read email and think about the Skencil/sK1
cooperation.

I think joining forces with sK1 project would be a very good thing for
Skencil.  Skencil has been more or less dormant for the last few years
and a cooperation or merger with sK1 would revitalize it.  It also seems
to me that the goals of the sK1 project, i.e. developing a a general
purpose vector drawing program that can be used for more than SVG
editing, are close to what I wanted Skecil to become when I started the
project[1].

Now for some more technical things.

I found some time during the vacation to compare the sK1 0.9pre01
preview with current Skencil 0.6 versions.  The first thing one notices
when doing a diff is that you reformatted the Python code to use tabs
for indentation.  I could have understood all spaces, but tabs, yuck :-)

Looking closer, it seems you haven't ported any of the bugfixes I made
in the 0.6 branch since the fork.  That's a bit unfortunate because they
address some important things like compatibility with newer Python
versions.

I haven't found the time yet to look at the new code, though.  It would
also be nice to have newer versions available.


>> We thought that moving to Gtk was due to be closer to enterprise Linux
>> solutions. May be this our opinion is wrong...
>
> He wanted to cooperate more with the GNOME developers

The idea was to use a more modern toolkit -- back in 1999 when I started
the GTK port, Tk didn't seem to be going anywhere -- and to make it
easier to cooperate with other projects like the Gimp.

> True. Currently 0.7 SVN trunk is not ready to be released as a tarball.

Well, there have been tarball development releases, but it's not ready
for endusers.

>> System Gtk/Gnome binding links Skencil development to Gtk/Gnome life cycle.

Skencil 0.7 only uses GTK so far.  The only library it uses that comes
from GNOME is libart and that's self-contained and thus doesn't require
any other GNOME libraries.  GTK's backwards compatibility seems to be
very good, so I don't think Skencil 0.7 is tied to GTK release cycles
anymore than 0.6 is tied to Tk.

I'll try to reply to some of the other mails as I find the time.


   Bernhard



[1] I notice with some amazement that I wrote the first code for what
later became Sketch a bit more than ten years ago, in the autumn of
1996.

-- 
Intevation GmbH                                 http://intevation.de/
Skencil                                           http://skencil.org/
Thuban                                  http://thuban.intevation.org/