Roadmap discussion for 2.9 and 3.0

[Sven Langkamp]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:

> Krita Roadmap
> -------------
>
> 2.8 will be awesome, but after 2.8 comes 2.9...
>
> During the 2.8 beta phase, we've been lucky to have had a lot of input on
> areas where Krita should be better. The main areas are:
>
> * MDI interface (more than one document loaded in one window)
>

I would give this the top priority, because it's the single feature that
has be merged before we go to 3.0 and will likely also need a lot of work.


> * Mask handling: creating and converting masks is not as easy as it should
> be.
>
> * Selection handling: modifying selections is really inconvenient at the
> moment
>
> * Line quality: we should try and figure out how better anti-alias
> especially thin lines. This wasn't a problem before because our display
> quality wasn't very good, but since that's excellent now, it is a problem
>
> * Performance of the color correction system: the final conversion step
> for display is now holding us back. We might be able to move that to the
> GPU as well, for the OpenGL canvas
>

Have you measured the impact of that? I have seen many comments about bad
performance recently. Users expect fast painting with the biggest brush on
a 10k x 10k image.


> * Text and vector tools. We share these with Calligra. The current system
> is a hybrid of ODT, ODG and SVG. Creating and manipulating text is
> difficult, the difference between the two text tools is hard to explain,
> and finally, the results aren't good and we cannot save all features the
> gui offers.
>

That's a very tricky problem. I know that the current system has a lot of
shortcoming, but there is currently no good alternative for it. We have to
keep backwards compatibility, so we can't throw it out. The problem with
the text are more related to bugs in the text tools rather than the
fileformat (the shadow problem is too). Even if we throw it out, it would
take months to replace the text tools alone and years if you want to reach
the capabilities of other applications.

In any case the text shapes and text tools would have to be replace, if you
want to store as SVG we would likely need massive changes in Flake too. We
have seriously question is that is really a justified change, considering
how much effort would have to be dumped into it.

* The dirty brush proposal and related preset handling issues
>
> This is obviously already more than we can handle in one release period,
> so we need to prioritize. Also, I might have forgotten a topic that is more
> important than any of these!
>
> Then there is the roadmap towards 3.0. 3.0 should be our Qt5 release,
> which means no refactoring, just porting. For that to be as smooth as
> possible, at least the MDI refactoring should have landed, and any other
> big refactorings that influence which dependencies we have.
>
>
I would add:

*Unified shortcut confguration: Currently many users are confused that the
shortcuts for the actions and the input manager shortcuts are split over
two locations. These should be combined into a single UI. The same
unification should be done for the done for saving shortcuts so everything
is saved to shortcut profiles (which should be a resource).
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