[Skencil-users] Join forces for skencil1/sK1? (was: sK1)

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Igor,

On Monday 20 November 2006 00:04, Igor Novikov wrote:
> >Why not join forces on a tcl/tk based Skencil1/sK1 development?
>
> We absolutely agree that it will be the best way. But on this moment our
> team is "in stream" i.e. in active prerelease stage. If we start projects
> joining we lost development speed. More over we should stop development
> because in joined project new roadmap, coding conventions etc. should be
> created. Therefore our opinion is to try join forces after sK1 v0.9
> release.

whatever works best for you as a good point in time for
joining efforts will be fine with me as well.
Currently Bernhard H. is on vacation, 
so we probably have to wait for him to comment.

So I do not want to slow down any development. :)
Currently you are doing much more to advance the product.

> sK1 summer preview was commonly announced into russian and ukrainian Linux
> community, therefore many users are waiting for the release. We hope
> involving the community into sK1 development.

The earlier we agree on how to join forces, the better it will
be for growing the community.

> >Skencil/sK1 is still a strong application,
> >so joining forces would help to grow the community.
> >Packaging and documentation efforts would be reduced and all this.
>
> Practically there is only one potential competitor - XaraXtreme. 
> But this application is not a favorite under Win32 platform, 
> because it's not suitable for printing industry.

I read about XaraXtreme, but I haven't tried it yet.
BTW: Did you also evaluate http://www.cenon.info/frame_gb.html?

> As you can see sK1 interface and behavior is highly similar to Corel or
> Illustrator. We plan that our potential users (first of all, designers) 
> will find in sK1 a friendly enviroment like under Win.

This sounds very good. One advantage of Skencil GTK is the possible
Windows port. Do you plan to port towards windows? 
In regular Skencil there is quite a bit of Xlib code if I remember correctly.

> >We have wondered why the fork has happened in the first place without
> >some more communication from your side.
>
> The first reason is that Internet communications in Ukraine were primitive
> in 2003-2004 years. We has only dial-up connection, 
> therefore there was no way for active community collaboration. 
> Now, personal LAN connection is usual thing.
>
> Second reason is our experience in OSS world. When we start fork we were
> "newbe" in the community.

Thanks for the explanation.
I can reassure you that Skencil's authors were quite open to code,
suggestions and all this. Many coming from Germany, we do have a habit
of discussion things in trying to find a nicer solution sometimes.
:)

> Also there is commonly held view in Linux community that Skencil
> development is something like "closed private club". 
> Even this fact is reflected in wikipedia.org,
> at least in russian article about Inkscape. 
> The project should be more open  and
> more active to increase popularity.

It is true that Bernhard H. had most of the sources on his private
machine way back, with him being the only one able to commit,
but this has changed when he started to use Savannah.
Since then the webpages and repository have been open,
we moved to a gforge software hosted at Intevation itself,
because Savannah hat problems for about a year.

> >So what do you think about the general idea?
>
> We like this idea! :)

This is great news!

Bernhard R.
-- 
Managing Director - Owner, www.intevation.net       (Free Software Company)
Germany Coordinator, fsfeurope.org       (Non-Profit Org for Free Software)
www.kolab-konsortium.com   (Email/Groupware Solution, Professional Service)
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