Re: Maintaining / Helping out on Dia

[Alejandro Imass <aimass yabarana com>]

Just my $0.02 Background: I have been using DIA extensively since the 90s. I use DIA and dia2code for UML and even do all my database modelling in DIA with class diagrams and then create the DB models based on that. I have even contributed to dia2code on enhancements that we've needed over the years and we just give for free to the dia2code community.

The reality is that DIA is an amazing piece of software but it's old and the diagrams it produces are ugly. I know this doesn't sound very technical but people love eye candy and DIA has been falling short on this for a while now. 

IMHO maybe a fork is required to take DIA to the next level and separate it from GNOME even if you decide to keep using GTK and move to 3 or whatever. More than the actual graphics library I would look into taking the things that are really valuable from the current code and perhaps think of a complete re-write with React, Anguar, Ember or whatever. I would get out of XML and go to JSON and re-write the app into a React front-end with a corresponding backend and API. IMHO the greatest long term existential threat to DIA is not Visio or Omnigraffle, it's draw.io

Best,

Alex