Re: What's wrong with Dia the way it is?

[Edheldil <dia001 eowyn cz>]

On 05/12/2018 18.32, Steve Litt wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> What's wrong with Dia just the way it is? It works. It's exportable
> into Inkscape for conversion to SVG. 

Hi, all,

Though I like Dia (*), there are (many) places where it's sorely
lacking. My biggest peeves are:

  * Shapes rotation - you can't rotate shapes in 90 degrees increments,
not speaking of free rotation.

  * Gradients are not there either.

  * Ad-hoc adding or moving connection points.

And there are others that can be worked around or that i can live without.

If Dia now approaches obsolescence due to unsupported libraries, either
we port it to the new ones, or it will disappear.


Edheldil


Btw, there still exists a "central" repository for Dia shapes -
http://dia-installer.de . Sadly, its maintainer, Steffen Macke, died
several years ago and I doubt anyone still manages it.

(*) I know Dia for quite a long time and made some  (not so great)
shapes for it as well, so my criticism is not really meant in the bad
vein. I also understand that if anybody wants changes and features, it's
up to him to make them, because there's nobody employed to do work on Dia.




> Sure, I have a few qualms with the way Dia works, mainly having to do
> with the relationship between text and shapes, but perhaps some good
> workaround documentation would settle that. I'd love to have
> Visio-quality diagram components, and perhaps if somebody writes some
> docs on how to make your own components with the connection points
> *you* want, that will be solved. Plus the fact that if everyone
> authoring new components puts them together in an online hierarchical
> library, perhaps with keyword search, our diagrams could start to rival
> those of visio users.
>
> If some of the libraries used by Dia are in the process of being
> deprecated, then those certainly must be replaced by their successors.
> But other than that, why the emphasis on maintenance? Sometimes
> something's so good it needs no more maintenance (fetchmail is one
> example).
>
> Right now Dia works for people on all sorts of computers. It's very
> DIYable. My experience has been that in many cases, people in a hurry
> to "improve" software end up making it into a buggy, DIY-not-allowed
> monolithic entanglement.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt 
> December 2018 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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