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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Unified document viewer, lack of communication
From:       Wilfried Huss <Wilfried.Huss () gmx ! at>
Date:       2005-06-04 17:47:01
Message-ID: 200506041947.01813.Wilfried.Huss () gmx ! at
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Am Saturday 04 June 2005 19:14 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> A Dissabte 04 Juny 2005 18:53, Wilfried Huss va escriure:
> > Am Saturday 04 June 2005 18:17 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> > > A Dissabte 04 Juny 2005 17:14, Stefan Kebekus va escriure:
> > > > I just learned from Wilfried Huss that you (Aaron Seigion, Zack
> > > > Rusin) have posed the "Google Summer of Code" task to write "join the
> > > > functionality of KPDF, KGhostview and KDVI in a single shell". I am a
> > > > little surprised that I, as the maintainer of KDVI was not informed
> > > > about this, in particular, since Wilfried Huss and me have been
> > > > working on a unified viewer for quite a while now, and have already
> > > > produced a good viewer, with a
> > > > well-documented API that already supports 3 file types.
> > >
> > > Well, that's probably a fault in my part, i suggested the "bounty" to
> > > Zack, and forgot to tell you where working actively on kdvi.
> > >
> > > The problem is that we have two viewer shells that are "expandable",
> > > kdvi beign one and kpdf beign other (you can already open all image
> > > file formats kimgio supports on kpdf) so one has "to die" if we want to
> > > have a unified shell.
> >
> > KViewShell can open DVI, FAX, and DjVu-Files.
> >
> > Why does a document viewer needs to open pictures?
>
> It does not need, you'll notice you can open ONLY pdf files from kpdf, if
> you want to open images you need to use kpdf foo.png from the shell.
> i just did it as a proof of concept that we could open other things
> different of pdf. But on the other said AFAIK a fax is nothing more than a
> tiff that is an image, right?

No the fax-g3 and fax-g4 formats do support multiple pages. The individual
pages are encoded as tiff files.

> > You may know that I have contacted you about a possible collaboration a
> > few months ago, nothing came out of it.
>
> Yes, i remember it, i would not say i was the only guilty of making it
> fail, but even if i was, does it matter?
>
> > And I replyed to a post of Enrico Ros on kde-graphics-devel on the future
> > of KPDF with another offer to combine our efforts. No one even answerd.
> > http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-graphics-devel/2005-February/000095.htm
> >l Some things I said in this post about KViewShell are not valid anymore.
> > For example we now support documents with more then one papersizes.
> >
> > So I don't understand what is different know?
>
> Nothing is different now, i'm not going to do any work of it.

Ok. Well Stefan and me do work on it, so it would be great if proposals 
would be discussed with us, so that we can coordinate our work.

So far nobody has done this.

> > That Google drops some money?
>
> And that atracts other person completely unrelated to me to work on it?
> Your sentence seems to imply i'm doing something wrong that now google is
> offering money? Could you please explain it?

Well without the bounty Stefan and me would have worked further on this 
anyway. It is great that now more people are willing to work on it, we should
just coordinate our efforts. I think a bounty is better suited for a task that 
can be easily accomplished by a single developer. While this should be
a coordinated affort of KPDF, Ghostview and KViewShell.

It is a bit unfortunate that is discussion has moved to the public 
mailinglist. This whole thing started because I asked Aaron and Zack to make 
the description of the bounty more general. They refused and I still don't 
understand why.

> > > The thing is "do the person that implements the unified shell has to
> > > use kpdf or kdvi as a base?" i don't know, the bounty text says to use
> > > kpdf but i assume that is because Zack has not used kdvi lately and has
> > > seen how much it has matured.
> > >
> > > Piotr Szymanski (Niedakh on irc djurban username in svn iirc) wants to
> > > implement that bounty, i think we should leave him decide which shell
> > > he prefers to work on/expand and ask his questions.
> >
> > Will he also maintain it after the bounty?
>
> Why do you ask it to me and not to the two messages he has sent to the
> list?

I just asked this because you said he alone should decide about the design of
the code. I am ok with this if he is willing to maintain it afterwards. But I 
think it would be better to discuss the design first.

> Albert (who does not understand the beligerancy kdvi devels seem to have
> against him)

We have of course nothing against you.

Greetings,
Wilfried.
 
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