> What site did you download from? sourceforge.net - a site with which I am reasonably familiar and generally trust. I found it natural to turn there when more information on the 1.3.4 release was not to be found on scribus.net, and indeed, the 1.3.4 page on the scribus site specifically references this as the place to download from. I thought it quite odd that there wasn't even a link, just a plain text reference to the URL, but see below.
> Go to www.scribus.net, click Downloads and you get to a page where 1.3.4 > doesn't even show... > > It seems as if Scribus developers get the blame for distros packaging > 1.3.4 as a stable version even though it isn't? Hmm. I don't think I am "blaming" anyone for anything, and I certainly don't mean to imply that I think the developers are deliberately trying to mislead folks. I am simply trying to point out that, to someone not already familiar with the inner workings of this project, it is easy to develop some wrong idea about 1.3.4. Not because the site contains any out and out lies, but just because it isn't very clear. It is true that it is "obvious" something is a bit odd. But frankly, the impression I got was not "hmm, I guess 1.3.4 must be unstable", but rather, "hmm, I guess the developers are too busy to really update the web site to make the new version easier to obtain". Obviously, the wrong conclusion, but again, there is nothing specific on the web site to prevent that sort of misunderstanding. Let me try to put you in the shoes of someone just coming upon Scribus relatively recently: I actually first downloaded a 1.3.3.x version a years or two ago. My first act was to create an image frame, my second was to try to drag and drop an image into it. Needless to say, that didn't work. After loading my desired image "manually", I then attempted to resize it to fit my frame, and was unable to figure out how to do this, despite having experience with other DTP applications. So I put it aside. Eventually I checked out the tutorials on the wiki site and learned about the all-important Properties window, and from there I was able to start using the application - mostly for very small projects (flyers, etc). However, I note that on the main Scribus page, it mentions "substantial core code changes" coming with 1.3.4, and on the wiki site, there are numerous references to file format changes that would become more settled in the 1.3.4 time frame. Between that and the (inexplicable to me) lack of drag & drop support, the overall impression of the software I got was - "has potential, but apparently, I should wait for 1.3.4 to come along before doing any serious work". So over the next few months, I would check scribus.net periodically to see if 1.3.4 had been released yet. The fact that it was quite a while from the time I first learned of the plans for "substantial core code changes" and the file format changes to the time 1.3.4 was actually released suggested to me that this was essentially a fairly major release. The fact that scribus.net site did not make actually downloading this release easy was, as I mentioned, somewhat perplexing, but I assumed the developers were more concerned with maintaining the software than maintaining the site. After all, a number of open source projects really live their life on sourceforge. Not that sourceforge was a fountain of information, either, and the fact that the 1.3.4 release was labeled scribus-devel was another potential clue that maybe this was not the stable release I had been awaiting - but again, in the absence of any clear explanation f the status, I honestly didn't know *what* to think. So I download it, and it seemed to work. Luckily, I didn't dive right in to a major project, and by the time I needed to start working on my current project, I was just beginning to figure out (by browsing the wiki and this mailing list) what the story actually was. But I guess my point is, a few sentences added to the scribus.net main page would have saved me an awful lot of confusion, and quite apparently, I am not alone in feeling this way. That said, I would probably still have chosen to use 1.3.4 for this project. -------------- Marc Sabatella marc at outsideshore.com
