Re: [CREATE] Inkscape questions

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 11:02 PM, Yuval Levy wrote:

> In 2008 the project went from 1800+ new to about 100 new.  If this was just a
> consequence of the tool used (as implied in the first article), going back up
> to 634 new needs an explanation.

As already explained before, this is because a team worked on triaging
right after importing reports from SF tracker. We let things rot after
that due to lack of active contributors. ~suv and Nicolas Dufour do a
great job, but they are mostly on their tod.

> The other thing about this, and the reason why I place it at the create level:
> scaling and rotating of bitmaps seems to me like an operation common to many
> tools.  Wouldn't it make sense to have a single, shared library for that, so
> that advances in technology benefits everybody automatically?

You mean GEGL?

Alexandre Prokoudine
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Re: [CREATE] Inkscape questions

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Yuval Levy wrote:

> I need a historical perspective.
>
> 1. has the project become more popular / received massively more bug reports
> in 2011 than in 2008?

Can't say for sure.

> 2. has the project lost resources / people that were working through the bug
> reports to triage and fix them?

Yes. See below.

> 3. who was responsible for the stellar 2008 performace of bringing down the
> count of untriaged bugs to less than 100?

When we moved from SF to Launchpad, there was an active team of half a
dozen of people (at least) who worked on it.

>  are these people still around? still active?

Only few.

> 4. how have developers reacted to the restructured tracker?  has the project
> seen more bug fixes in 2008 than in previous years?  and if so, has the pace
> slowed down since?  why?

The kind of tracker has nothing to do with amount of bugfixes.

> 5. how has the devs team evolved over the 2008 to 2011 period? have some key
> players reduced their involvment / left the prject?  motives?  have new key
> player emerged?  was there a "generational transition" and if yes was it
> managed? how?

2007-2008 was when last people from the initial team gradually stopped
contributing. We never completely recovered since then. Of the old
crew only Jon Cruz is around (some of the old team is working on 2geom
library, our side project). Right now we are down to just few people
who actually fix bugs and several GSoC students who have became
regular contributors. Bugs triaging is done by mostly one bugfixer and
another person who isn't developer.

> Last but not least, I have bumped across two Inkscape limitations and I was
> wondering how useful is the Inkscape bug tracker at this point in time:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/775226

Wrong tool. Use Scribus.

1. Create a new page with frames for images.
2. Group those frames.
3. Send this group to scrapbook.
4. Drag this group from scrapbook on every new page.

Note that you can create different compositions of frames and save
them all in your scrapbook, then just drag onto canvas whichever you
need at the moment.

As for sharpening, nothing prevents you from doing selective
sharpening on just the images you need. This is what both bitmap
filters (ImageMagick based) and SVG filters are for.

> https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/797164

Can't comment on this one much.

> especially the first one is very much annoying me and I would classify it as
> "critical", but I know too little about the project and its aims to know if
> such a classification would fit the project's vision.

Some smarter interpolation methods like those that keep penetrating
GEGL thanks to Nicolas and Adam would be nice indeed. However unsharp
mask and co. are always the last word, interpolation regardless. You
have it in Inkscape already.

> Is there such a thing as an Inkscape user survey?

Not that I know of. I think we shall do one later this year. However,
as you will surely understand, given how few developers we have
around, some kind of survey might indeed help us understand things,
but won't help us do much about it.

Alexandre Prokoudine
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Re: [CREATE] Create resources stuff

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 7:54 PM, Camille Bissuel wrote:

> Maybe the Alexandre Prodoukine's

It's Prokoudine, thank you :)

> or the a.l.e.'s http://www.freegraphicdesigner.org/

Whois doesn't know about this domain.

> are suitable if they agree.

As for LGW, we are in the middle of switching to a new CMS, and while
we might implement a GHNS compatible module in the future, chances to
get it here and now are fairly slim. Besides I would rather prefer
this would-be generic GHNS server to be an independent entity
regarding myself.

I don't think a new domain is such a big deal. The question really is
whether you have people to maintain it. Location and name are second
important. The Open Font Library story should have been a lesson in
that respect, I think.

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Re: [CREATE] Create resources stuff

[Camille Bissuel]

Hi all,

this discussion sounds like the one on the "libregraphics dot org" one ;)
I like the idea by the way.

In my memory, Jon Nordby had reserved a suitable similar domain last year
for this.
Maybe the Alexandre Prodoukine's http://libregraphicsworld.org/ or the
a.l.e.'s http://www.freegraphicdesigner.org/are
suitable if they agree.

Why not start to use one of thoses now, with "resources dot
oneofthosedomains dot org" ?
http://create.freedesktop.org/resources/ is ok too if we have nothing else.

Jon, Alexandre, a.l.e., what do you think ?

Cheers,
Camille



2011/6/19 Gregory Pittman 

> On 06/19/2011 11:16 AM, Yuval Levy wrote:
>
>> On June 19, 2011 10:55:17 AM a.l.e wrote:
>>
>>> just one question: do the create folk really like that "stuff" thing for
>>> resources?
>>>
>> I can't answer for others and there is no poll known to me to answer the
>> question.  I can answer for myself...
>>
>>  i'm no english native speaker, so i'm not sure i'm the best person to
>>> judge, but me don't like it.
>>>
>> ... and you can (and should!) too.  Everybody's opinions are welcome.  No
>> need
>> to be a native speaker.  In fact the perspective of non-native speaker is
>> more
>> important simply because there are more non-native speakers than native
>> speakers and this is not about getting things correct from a
>> grammar/sytanx
>> point of view, but form how it sounds and feels and types for everybody.
>>
>> I am no native speaker.
>>
>> My own personal opinion about the few words that have been floating the
>> room
>> for quite some time, in no particular order:
>> * stuff:  I dislike it.  It's as generic as "thing" and won't yeild useful
>> search engine results.
>> * LGM:  I dislike acronyms.  They require insider knowledge and are thus
>> difficult to memorize, and are ambigous to different sets of insiders and
>> by
>> extensions to search engines.  No good to communicate to the outside
>> world.
>> * create:  nice but too generic / ambiguous.  while it expresses what we
>> do,
>> there is little chance that we can pump into it enough power to make it
>> stand
>> on its own.
>> * freedesktop: wrong context
>> * free / libre: relevant in a different context.  too broad to define "us"
>> (we
>> are only a small part of the free / libre movement) and too narrow to
>> define
>> "us" as well (libre graphics is just a part of the graphics universe)
>> * graphics / graphicsworld: is what come nearest to what I like, but still
>> a
>> little bit too generic (for search engines and for mnemonics).  Plus, some
>> of
>> us create multimedia, which covers also the time dimension and a broader
>> space
>> that includes also the 20Hz-20KHz band and not only the "visible window"
>> in
>> the 400–790THz band.  And creativity goes beyond audio and video - there
>> is
>> also text and surrogates like braille; and there is the physical
>> creativity
>> with clay and other materials, rapid prototyping (3D-printers) etc.
>>
>> So maybe a definition in terms of *purpose*.  What are we creating for?
>>  Is it
>> a form of communication?  exchange?  self-gratification?  all or none of
>> the
>> above?
>>
>> Of course it is always easier to criticize than to propose alternatives,
>> so
>> please don't take the above as diminishing any of the terms mentioned.  If
>> I
>> had thought a better term, I would have proposed it long ago.  I can live
>> with
>> the status quo of a cacophony of terms and duplication of resources until
>> a
>> superior term emerges from it by its sheer intrinsic power.  In many parts
>> of
>> the world a photo camera is called a "Kodak"; adhesive tape is called
>> "Scotch"; and a refirgerator is called a "Frigidaire" - the intrinsic
>> power of
>> these terms have transcended their artificially created brands (when
>> effort
>> needs to be put into a term to etch it in the collective language) to
>> establish themselves as common words (carried by their own intrinsic
>> power).
>> In more recent time, Google is one of those terms.  One day we'll find our
>> term and we'll know it just because it will become apparent.  Until then,
>> keep
>> creating, keep trying, and just because you invented an incumbent term
>> that is
>> being "attacked" by a new term, don't be defensive about it.
>>
> I think you've touched on a number of legitimate complaints about these
> various terms. As you say yourself, complaints are not solutions, so I think
> in general until someone can come up with better alternatives his/her
> complaints are not likely to get much traction.
>
> I used to have a similar reaction to 'create', but now I think it's pretty
> good, and allows for shifting directions of interest, incorporation of new
> things and ideas. I do agree about 'stuff' being troublesome, even before
> considering the issues non-native English speakers face.
>
> We do have to be mindful of how much various search functions are used to
> locate things, so it may be that somewhere attached to

Re: [CREATE] Inkscape questions

[Yuval Levy]

Thanks for your reply, Liam.

On June 19, 2011 01:51:57 PM Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-06-19 at 13:11 -0400, Yuval Levy wrote:
> > I am trying to make sense of the discrepancy between
> > 
> > April 2008: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/135
> > 
> > and
> > 
> > June 2011: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape
> > 
> > (634 new, 3083 open) ?
> 
> I don't see a discrepancy.  The first report is not about open vs closed
> bugs, it's about new vs "triaged" bugs - i.e. whether or not the bugs
> have been categorised and identified as bugs.


In 2008 the project went from 1800+ new to about 100 new.  If this was just a 
consequence of the tool used (as implied in the first article), going back up 
to 634 new needs an explanation.

Then maybe there is my expectation that once the gates are open, the river 
will start flowing unencumbered?  Opening the gates of the bug tracker, and 
triaging the bugs, has seemingly not helped much.

I have done something similar with Hugin about half a year ago, and the 
initial results were great:  everything got triaged / sorted out.  duplicates 
and outdated reports have been weeded out, giving us a clearer picture.  some 
bug fixing has started.  but bug fixing has not accelerated and as the in-flow 
of reports increases instead of ending up at an equilibrium with a higher 
capacity for bug processing we end up in a disequilibrium with an even higher 
number of new or open bugs - the bush becomes thicker again and the overview 
is lost...


> Note also that Inkscape is not in fact an Ubuntu-only project.

nor is Hugin.  you don't need to be an Ubuntu project to use the Ubuntu 
infrastructure.  I have driven the migration of our bug tracker from 
Sourceforge to Launchpad because I found Launchpad easier to use and because I 
hoped it would help us improve ticket processing.  I have looked at Inkscape 
as a successful example.  I perceive Inkscape as being ahead of us and I am 
trying to learn from their experience.


> If no-one else has commented on it my guess would be that not many other
> people are in that position.  It often happens that one person, or a few
> people, are unable to use a particular program at all (a "critical"
> bug).  The solutions for them are generally one or more of...
> (1) fix the bug and submit the fix as a patch (this is the Open Source
> Way)
> (2) hire or bribe a programmer to fix the bug and submit the fix as a
> patch
> (3) persuade one or more active developers on th project that the bug
> should be fixed, or if it it's easy, that you'll go away if it's
> fixed :-)
> (4) use a different program
> 
> For (3), which you are trying to do, you typically need to become part
> of the project community

actually I'd be happy with (1) but need guidance and have not yet found the 
right entry point for me.  This is one point in which Hugin may be ahead of 
Inkscape (or, more likely, I may not be aware of the Inkscape resources out 
there).  When I got on the Hugin bandwagon, building it for your own platform 
was a Mammoth task for wizards.  I nagged the developers for long enough and 
mobilized the wizards in the community until the project had a build 
documented in painful detail, enabling even the most newbie of newbies (like I 
was) to get easily on the learning curve and start hacking.  Building the code 
from source is the first pre-requiste for (1).


> In this particular case, though, it's hard to rotate a bitmap except by
> multiples of 90 degrees and not lose sharpness or detail, and it's hard
> to scale a bitmap, especially trying to make it larger as you're then
> asking the computer program to add detail on the fly.

I am actually trying to downsize more than upsize, but yes, this case should 
also be considered.

 
> You might find the gimp does a better job at these two tasks than
> Inkscape.

I did, and indeed this is how I solved my problem - at least partially.  It is 
still not a nice solution because I would like to place those bitmaps inside 
enriching SVG drawings that are then rendered for the final bitmap for web or 
print.  At the moment, many changes in the SVG drawing force me to re-render 
the bitmap and it is all a cumbersome manual process, and something that I 
believe could be automated.


> My guess would be that a good architectural approach might be
> for Inkscape to use the babl and gegl libraries to rotate and scale
> bitmaps for export to png, wit appropriate box filters

sounds like the approach for me.  whether I have the skill and knowledge to 
implement it, i doubt it, but at least i can try if i know how to build 
Inkscape from scratch and where to start hacking.  I built Gimp from scratch a 
couple of years ago, I guess I can get back at it.

The other thing about this, and the reason why I place it at the create level: 
scaling and rotating of bitmaps seems to me like an operation common to many 
tools.  Wouldn't it make sense to have a single, shared library for that, so 
that advances in 

Re: [CREATE] Inkscape questions

[Liam R E Quin]

On Sun, 2011-06-19 at 13:11 -0400, Yuval Levy wrote:

> I am trying to make sense of the discrepancy between
> 
> April 2008: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/135
> 
> and
> 
> June 2011: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape
> 
> (634 new, 3083 open) ?

I don't see a discrepancy.  The first report is not about open vs closed
bugs, it's about new vs "triaged" bugs - i.e. whether or not the bugs
have been categorised and identified as bugs.

Note also that Inkscape is not in fact an Ubuntu-only project.


> I am trying to make sense of the evolution of Inkscape because IMO 
> understanding it can help Hugin, which seems to be a couple of years behind 
> the curve if there is such a curve for an open source project lifecycle.  I 
> suspect there is.  I am also trying to gather annecdotal evidence to confirm 
> or refute my still-in-development theory of the open source project 
> lifecycle.  
> Last but not least, I have bumped across two Inkscape limitations and I was 
> wondering how useful is the Inkscape bug tracker at this point in time:
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/775226
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/797164
> 
> especially the first one is very much annoying me and I would classify it as 
> "critical",

If no-one else has commented on it my guess would be that not many other
people are in that position.  It often happens that one person, or a few
people, are unable to use a particular program at all (a "critical"
bug).  The solutions for them are generally one or more of...
(1) fix the bug and submit the fix as a patch (this is the Open Source
Way)
(2) hire or bribe a programmer to fix the bug and submit the fix as a
patch
(3) persuade one or more active developers on th project that the bug
should be fixed, or if it it's easy, that you'll go away if it's
fixed :-)
(4) use a different program

For (3), which you are trying to do, you typically need to become part
of the project community -- anything from hanging out for a while in
their IRC channel (or possibly Jabber for inkscape) to contributing to
the project, e.g. artwork, tutorials, resources, in a way that can be
used immediately (e.g. posting tutorials on existing forums)

In this particular case, though, it's hard to rotate a bitmap except by
multiples of 90 degrees and not lose sharpness or detail, and it's hard
to scale a bitmap, especially trying to make it larger as you're then
asking the computer program to add detail on the fly.

You might find the gimp does a better job at these two tasks than
Inkscape.  My guess would be that a good architectural approach might be
for Inkscape to use the babl and gegl libraries to rotate and scale
bitmaps for export to png, wit appropriate box filters, but there would
still be problems with shapness if you took a 100x100 pixel image and
scaled it to be 500x500 pixels in the rendered output, or if you tried
to rotate a bitmap image by (say) 3.5 degrees.

> I hope the insights gained from the conversation will be helpful to shape the 
> future of Hugin, and maybe of other FLOSS projects as well.

I've only tried to address your specific questions.

Open Source projects do of course have life cycles, and often do end up
abandoned, or get merged into some other project or taken over, or the
goals of the developers change and the program mutates to do something
entirely different.  I'm not closely involved with Inkscape, but as far
as I can tell it's being actively developed; the version I have here was
released in February 2011, and I see from the Inkscape.org that the
development version just got a new feature as of this June.

To some extent each project has its own culture. This is part of what
makes a conference like LGM so exciting.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.barefootliam.org

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Re: [CREATE] Create resources stuff

[Yuval Levy]

On June 19, 2011 11:37:07 AM Gregory Pittman wrote:
> complaints are not solutions, so I
> think in general until someone can come up with better alternatives
> his/her complaints are not likely to get much traction.

Fully agree.  I used to complain when people started new resources with new 
names and duplicate functions because I believed (and I still do) that they 
are a waste of resources.  In the meantime I have grown more tolerant of such 
duplication of effort and just don't waste *my* time on them.  What others do 
with their time is their call.


> We do have to be mindful of how much various search functions are used
> to locate things, so it may be that somewhere attached to pages
> associated with 'create' there needs to be some associated terms that
> help the site be found when searching for create site content. So in
> general, when some generic term like 'create', like 'stuff' gets used,
> how does it get embellished with some additional terms to help focus
> those of us when we come looking for it?

The pragmatic approach of trying to improve what is already there tend to be 
the most efficient and what you write makes generally sense to me.  That said, 
if you can help with the "create mailing list" search term, you may have a 
bright and rich future in the highly competitive arena of $EO.  IMHO Some 
things are beyond embellishment / quick fix.  You are welcome to prove me 
wrong and I'll be happy to pay you a beer.  In release notes such issues are 
mostly mentioned under "known limitations" and they will stay there until 
somebody finds them painful enough to put in the necessary effort to fix them, 
which usually require a redesign and not a simple quick fix.

Yuv


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Re: [CREATE] Create resources stuff

[Camille Bissuel]

Count me in for graphicskiosk.org ;)

cheers,
Camille

2011/6/19 a.l.e 

> hi
>
> > So maybe a definition in terms of *purpose*.
>
> after a short brainstorming with myself, i've reserved -- and present you
> as a candidate -- the graphicskiosk.org
>
> a place where you go and pick your graphics resources...
>
> afaict, easy to understand in most "european" languages...
>
>
> i have nothing against better names!
>
>
> ciao
> a.l.e
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Re: [CREATE] Create resources stuff

[a.l.e]

hi

> So maybe a definition in terms of *purpose*.

after a short brainstorming with myself, i've reserved -- and present you as a 
candidate -- the graphicskiosk.org

a place where you go and pick your graphics resources...

afaict, easy to understand in most "european" languages...


i have nothing against better names!


ciao
a.l.e
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[CREATE] Inkscape questions

[Yuval Levy]

Hi all,

at first I thought to write this to a single person from the community that is 
familiar with the Inkscape project and could help me liaise with the Inkscape 
developers.  But as I read it before hitting the send button I realized that 
this is broader in scope.  Some of the issues raised in my request, including 
the life-cycle of a project; the efficiency of the use of bug tracking tools; 
and the specific issue I have with bitmap rescaling; could have answers 
outside of the limited scope of a single contributor or even a single project.

So here are a few questions which I hope will be answered by those kind enough 
to read them who are more familiar with Inkscape than I am.  Thank you in 
advance for helping me liaise with relevant people - any suggestion to bring 
the conversation to more specific mailing list(s) is welcome.

I am trying to make sense of the discrepancy between

April 2008: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/135

and

June 2011: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape

(634 new, 3083 open) ?


I need a historical perspective.

1. has the project become more popular / received massively more bug reports 
in 2011 than in 2008?

2. has the project lost resources / people that were working through the bug 
reports to triage and fix them?

3. who was responsible for the stellar 2008 performace of bringing down the 
count of untriaged bugs to less than 100?  are these people still around?  
still active?  Kudos to them!

4. how have developers reacted to the restructured tracker?  has the project 
seen more bug fixes in 2008 than in previous years?  and if so, has the pace 
slowed down since?  why?

5. how has the devs team evolved over the 2008 to 2011 period? have some key 
players reduced their involvment / left the prject?  motives?  have new key 
player emerged?  was there a "generational transition" and if yes was it 
managed? how?

I am trying to make sense of the evolution of Inkscape because IMO 
understanding it can help Hugin, which seems to be a couple of years behind 
the curve if there is such a curve for an open source project lifecycle.  I 
suspect there is.  I am also trying to gather annecdotal evidence to confirm 
or refute my still-in-development theory of the open source project lifecycle.  
Last but not least, I have bumped across two Inkscape limitations and I was 
wondering how useful is the Inkscape bug tracker at this point in time:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/775226
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/797164

especially the first one is very much annoying me and I would classify it as 
"critical", but I know too little about the project and its aims to know if 
such a classification would fit the project's vision.  It is surely critical 
for users who manipulate bitmaps in Inkscape, but Inkscape being primarily a 
drawing tool, I am not sure how many users do.  Is there such a thing as an 
Inkscape user survey?

I hope the insights gained from the conversation will be helpful to shape the 
future of Hugin, and maybe of other FLOSS projects as well.

Yuv


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Re: [CREATE] LGM 2011 site

[a.l.e]

hi

> Someone needs to update the front page to include a link for the
> videos now being posted:
> 
> http://river-valley.tv/conferences/lgm-2011
> 
> I would suggest making it more prominent than the generic link to
> videos for older LGMs now is.

+1

a.l.e
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[CREATE] LGM 2011 site

[Gregory Pittman]

Someone needs to update the front page to include a link for the videos 
now being posted:


http://river-valley.tv/conferences/lgm-2011

I would suggest making it more prominent than the generic link to videos 
for older LGMs now is.


Greg
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Re: [CREATE] Create resources stuff

[Gregory Pittman]

On 06/19/2011 11:16 AM, Yuval Levy wrote:

On June 19, 2011 10:55:17 AM a.l.e wrote:

just one question: do the create folk really like that "stuff" thing for
resources?

I can't answer for others and there is no poll known to me to answer the
question.  I can answer for myself...


i'm no english native speaker, so i'm not sure i'm the best person to
judge, but me don't like it.

... and you can (and should!) too.  Everybody's opinions are welcome.  No need
to be a native speaker.  In fact the perspective of non-native speaker is more
important simply because there are more non-native speakers than native
speakers and this is not about getting things correct from a grammar/sytanx
point of view, but form how it sounds and feels and types for everybody.

I am no native speaker.

My own personal opinion about the few words that have been floating the room
for quite some time, in no particular order:
* stuff:  I dislike it.  It's as generic as "thing" and won't yeild useful
search engine results.
* LGM:  I dislike acronyms.  They require insider knowledge and are thus
difficult to memorize, and are ambigous to different sets of insiders and by
extensions to search engines.  No good to communicate to the outside world.
* create:  nice but too generic / ambiguous.  while it expresses what we do,
there is little chance that we can pump into it enough power to make it stand
on its own.
* freedesktop: wrong context
* free / libre: relevant in a different context.  too broad to define "us" (we
are only a small part of the free / libre movement) and too narrow to define
"us" as well (libre graphics is just a part of the graphics universe)
* graphics / graphicsworld: is what come nearest to what I like, but still a
little bit too generic (for search engines and for mnemonics).  Plus, some of
us create multimedia, which covers also the time dimension and a broader space
that includes also the 20Hz-20KHz band and not only the "visible window" in
the 400–790THz band.  And creativity goes beyond audio and video - there is
also text and surrogates like braille; and there is the physical creativity
with clay and other materials, rapid prototyping (3D-printers) etc.

So maybe a definition in terms of *purpose*.  What are we creating for?  Is it
a form of communication?  exchange?  self-gratification?  all or none of the
above?

Of course it is always easier to criticize than to propose alternatives, so
please don't take the above as diminishing any of the terms mentioned.  If I
had thought a better term, I would have proposed it long ago.  I can live with
the status quo of a cacophony of terms and duplication of resources until a
superior term emerges from it by its sheer intrinsic power.  In many parts of
the world a photo camera is called a "Kodak"; adhesive tape is called
"Scotch"; and a refirgerator is called a "Frigidaire" - the intrinsic power of
these terms have transcended their artificially created brands (when effort
needs to be put into a term to etch it in the collective language) to
establish themselves as common words (carried by their own intrinsic power).
In more recent time, Google is one of those terms.  One day we'll find our
term and we'll know it just because it will become apparent.  Until then, keep
creating, keep trying, and just because you invented an incumbent term that is
being "attacked" by a new term, don't be defensive about it.
I think you've touched on a number of legitimate complaints about these 
various terms. As you say yourself, complaints are not solutions, so I 
think in general until someone can come up with better alternatives 
his/her complaints are not likely to get much traction.


I used to have a similar reaction to 'create', but now I think it's 
pretty good, and allows for shifting directions of interest, 
incorporation of new things and ideas. I do agree about 'stuff' being 
troublesome, even before considering the issues non-native English 
speakers face.


We do have to be mindful of how much various search functions are used 
to locate things, so it may be that somewhere attached to pages 
associated with 'create' there needs to be some associated terms that 
help the site be found when searching for create site content. So in 
general, when some generic term like 'create', like 'stuff' gets used, 
how does it get embellished with some additional terms to help focus 
those of us when we come looking for it?


Greg
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Re: [CREATE] Create resources stuff

[Yuval Levy]

On June 19, 2011 10:55:17 AM a.l.e wrote:
> just one question: do the create folk really like that "stuff" thing for
> resources?

I can't answer for others and there is no poll known to me to answer the 
question.  I can answer for myself...

> i'm no english native speaker, so i'm not sure i'm the best person to
> judge, but me don't like it.

... and you can (and should!) too.  Everybody's opinions are welcome.  No need 
to be a native speaker.  In fact the perspective of non-native speaker is more 
important simply because there are more non-native speakers than native 
speakers and this is not about getting things correct from a grammar/sytanx 
point of view, but form how it sounds and feels and types for everybody.

I am no native speaker.

My own personal opinion about the few words that have been floating the room 
for quite some time, in no particular order:
* stuff:  I dislike it.  It's as generic as "thing" and won't yeild useful 
search engine results.
* LGM:  I dislike acronyms.  They require insider knowledge and are thus 
difficult to memorize, and are ambigous to different sets of insiders and by 
extensions to search engines.  No good to communicate to the outside world.
* create:  nice but too generic / ambiguous.  while it expresses what we do, 
there is little chance that we can pump into it enough power to make it stand 
on its own.
* freedesktop: wrong context
* free / libre: relevant in a different context.  too broad to define "us" (we 
are only a small part of the free / libre movement) and too narrow to define 
"us" as well (libre graphics is just a part of the graphics universe)
* graphics / graphicsworld: is what come nearest to what I like, but still a 
little bit too generic (for search engines and for mnemonics).  Plus, some of 
us create multimedia, which covers also the time dimension and a broader space 
that includes also the 20Hz-20KHz band and not only the "visible window" in 
the 400–790THz band.  And creativity goes beyond audio and video - there is 
also text and surrogates like braille; and there is the physical creativity 
with clay and other materials, rapid prototyping (3D-printers) etc.

So maybe a definition in terms of *purpose*.  What are we creating for?  Is it 
a form of communication?  exchange?  self-gratification?  all or none of the 
above?

Of course it is always easier to criticize than to propose alternatives, so 
please don't take the above as diminishing any of the terms mentioned.  If I 
had thought a better term, I would have proposed it long ago.  I can live with 
the status quo of a cacophony of terms and duplication of resources until a 
superior term emerges from it by its sheer intrinsic power.  In many parts of 
the world a photo camera is called a "Kodak"; adhesive tape is called 
"Scotch"; and a refirgerator is called a "Frigidaire" - the intrinsic power of 
these terms have transcended their artificially created brands (when effort 
needs to be put into a term to etch it in the collective language) to 
establish themselves as common words (carried by their own intrinsic power).  
In more recent time, Google is one of those terms.  One day we'll find our 
term and we'll know it just because it will become apparent.  Until then, keep 
creating, keep trying, and just because you invented an incumbent term that is 
being "attacked" by a new term, don't be defensive about it.

Yuv's 2 cents


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Re: [CREATE] Create resources stuff

[a.l.e]

hi yuv,

> On June 18, 2011 12:05:25 PM Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 1:50 AM, j...@rejon.org wrote:
> > > Why not just put it at http://create.freedesktop.org/stuff
> > 
> > Very few things, if any, are easier to memorize than
> > http://third-level.domain.foo/directory/ :)
> 
> And create as 3rd level is also difficult to find on search engine.
> Try searching for "create maling list archive".
> 
> At least one of the terms in the domain should be unambigously
> associated with what we do.  Neither create nor freedesktop fit the
> description.
> 
> If a term is unambiguously asociated with what we do, it does not
> matter at which level in the URL it is - search engines are my long
> term memory.


i tend to fully agree with you...

just one question: do the create folk really like that "stuff" thing for 
resources?

i'm no english native speaker, so i'm not sure i'm the best person to judge, 
but me don't like it.

ciao
a.l.e
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Re: [CREATE] Create resources stuff

[Yuval Levy]

On June 18, 2011 12:05:25 PM Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 1:50 AM, j...@rejon.org wrote:
> > Why not just put it at http://create.freedesktop.org/stuff
> 
> Very few things, if any, are easier to memorize than
> http://third-level.domain.foo/directory/ :)

And create as 3rd level is also difficult to find on search engine.  Try 
searching for "create maling list archive".

At least one of the terms in the domain should be unambigously associated with 
what we do.  Neither create nor freedesktop fit the description.

If a term is unambiguously asociated with what we do, it does not matter at 
which level in the URL it is - search engines are my long term memory.

Yuv


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