Whither Krita?

[enki]

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, Cyrille Berger wrote:
>
>   
>> On Tuesday 15 September 2009, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>>     
>>> * stability: we have serious stability issues. Going out on a limb, I'd say
>>> that most are related to integration issues with KOffice libraries, instead
>>> of problems in our own core code.
>>>       
>
>   
>> What kind of stability ? It would be nice if they are recorded in 
>> bugs.kde.org, currently of the crashes, there is only the shiva filter bug that 
>> I can reproduce.
>>     
>
> And I cannot reproduce that one because I cannot get it installed on opensuse
> and cannot get it recognized on Kubuntu :-). But seriously, we have 12 crash
> reports in bugzilla, so that's a place where we miss stability. And it's not just
> crashes that fall  under "stability", things like bug 205644 cause data loss,
> so that's a stability issue too. All the split view things, losing shortcuts
> you've set after a restart (if that is still an issue, but I think it is).
>
>   
>>> * being part of a suite: not a problem for me, but I keep running into
>>> people who tell me that they won't use Krita because it is part of KOffice.
>>> Silly of them, but it means we are losing out on users and potential
>>> constributors who are way more part of the graphics/art scene than most
>>> people in the KOffice community.
>>>       
>> I am not convinced those people would start use krita even if it was stand 
>> alone, they are just using it as an argument. On all major distribution you 
>> can install krita seperately from koffice. I think they are just looking for 
>> excuses.
>> If krita was stand alone they would tell you I want a port to "Gtk" (I ofteen 
>> see a lot of those coming to Scribus irc channel with such a request). They 
>> will always find a reason.
>>     
>
> I'm not convinced: sure there will be people telling us "port to Gtk" (funny
> how nobody tells Maxy to do that with MyPaint), but I think we will have a wider
> appeal.
>
>   
I think answering to these guy is a good opportunity to do a little 
communication brainwashing :p
I'd answer :
- When you add a feature in your favorite editor, it is added.When you 
add a feature in Koffice, it is multiplied.
- In the future, some programmers may want to make an animation package 
of Kpresenter or Karbon, or a DTP application with Kword. Because the 
marvelous dev platform that is Koffice allows you to build a powerful 
app quickly. So Koffice is a potential Creative Suite too !
- It's cool when all the apps you use have the same shortcuts and 
widgets. Even Adobe can't acheive that in his own suite.
>   
>>> * fit and finish: we have lots of really cool features, but they all feel a
>>> bit unfinished (masks), or very unfinished (brush presets, color mixer).
>>> Which means not many people can really make use of them. When we move to
>>> git, I would like to have a main tree and a staging tree where all the new
>>> features land first only to be moved to main when they are really good
>>> enough.
>>>       
>
>   
>> that's probably how we are going to work with koffice as a whole. Especially if 
>> we move to a feature release every three monthes cycle ;)
>>     
>
> Yes, that would be a really excellent development. I really cannot wait for the
> move to git so we can work this way, and so I can follow Dmitry's work, and Lukas
> can see my progress on the mypaint paintop.
>
>   
Yes, I completey agree.
3 months ago we finally had a stable trunk. But the commit count 
increased a lot since, and we have been caught a bit by surprise by bugs 
and regressions.Shortening the release cycle and have an unstable branch 
would avoid a lot of problems.
Maybe we could even do releases of the unstable branch like Gimp, so 
that users can test new features earlier and help us to catch 
regressions. That would also make Krita appears more often in the news 
:). I was a bit sad that news website were praising a unstable release 
of Gimp for features that are in Krita since a long time.
Also a lot of important feature "died" because they weren't ready for 
the release, and I believe they would still be usable if they had been 
released.