2023 in preview (Libre Arts)

[Posted January 15, 2023 by corbet]

Libre Arts looks forward to progress in a long list of creative-art projects this year.

2022 was a really busy year for the [GIMP]: late binding for CMYK, text outlines, Align/Distribute revamp, floating selections gone, linked layers replaced with layer sets, all the file format support updates… Phew!
There is very little left to do before version 3.0 can be released. The last major change is rewriting the menus code because the old way was obsoleted in GTK3. The team also started saying no to major new features. Most recently, they moved vector layers from 3.0 to 3.0.2. That would be one hell of a minor update!

2023 in preview (Libre Arts)

Posted Jan 16, 2023 8:20 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (5 responses)

The state of scribus as noted here is sad. I didn't realise its situation was so dire, but indeed commits (as per their mailing list) have dried up for months now, with only two active committers before that; the "news" on their webpage is years old; and it takes much searching to even find their subversion repository (no git). It is the only viable open-source DTP program that I know of (other than the TeX ecosystem which is a different beast).

On the bright side, inkscape seems to be in fantastic shape and gimp is doing well too. For me, these are the trinity of graphical work.

2023 in preview (Libre Arts)

Posted Jan 16, 2023 9:25 UTC (Mon) by prokoudine (guest, #41788) [Link] (3 responses)

They do have a GitHub repo that looks like a mirror of SVN, they even seem to apply some of the pull requests:

https://github.com/scribusproject/scribus/

2023 in preview (Libre Arts)

Posted Jan 16, 2023 11:34 UTC (Mon) by imphil (subscriber, #62487) [Link] (2 responses)

Looking at the PRs in the Scribus GitHub repository, the closed ones seem to be re-done via SVN. As the README states: "The Scribus development team prefer svn over git and recommend you also use the public subversion repository at svn://scribus.net. This mirror is updated manually and is not supported by the Scribus team - for any issues, we will request you get the source from subversion before submitting bugs etc."

I'm using Scribus once a year and I wanted to contribute small things in the past, but the custom infrastructure with SVN and their own bug tracker makes it just too much of a burden for occasional drive-by PRs. I really hope they move to "standard" infrastructure going forward to attract more contributions.

2023 in preview (Libre Arts)

Posted Jan 16, 2023 11:51 UTC (Mon) by prokoudine (guest, #41788) [Link]

100% agreed

2023 in preview (Libre Arts)

Posted Jan 19, 2023 13:10 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It's simple: they don't have enough contributors and have no way to receive new contributors (because most newbies just wouldn't abandon GitHub for something they don't know) and old developers are too busy with many things (including Scribus mantainership) thus they wouldn't ever learn new tools.

I suspect the only way “out” for them is to freeze for some years more and then, when pain would become truly unbearable someone will revive it.

We may see few unsuccessful attempts to write the whole thing from scratch (most likely in Rust) before that will happen, though.

2023 in preview (Libre Arts)

Posted Jan 17, 2023 13:27 UTC (Tue) by schutz (subscriber, #3760) [Link]

Looking at the commit mailing-list, I had the same feeling that nothing was happening. However, it looks like some development is taking place, even though the commits are not posted to the mailing-list. You can see that e.g. in the Scribus WebSVN interface: https://www.scribus.net/websvn/log.php?repname=Scribus&...

It doesn't change the fact that it is only two developers making all the changes, and that is unlikely to be sustainable for "the only viable open-source DTP program", as you wrote.

And I also agree with your comment about the "the trinity of graphical work"; even despite the development issues, these three pieces of software are invaluable.

2023 in preview (Libre Arts)

Posted Jan 16, 2023 15:47 UTC (Mon) by Kamiccolo (subscriber, #95159) [Link]

umph, OpenShot has fallen through the cracks again :( Despite releasing some nice features and 3.0 last December.

Blender

Posted Jan 16, 2023 16:58 UTC (Mon) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

Blender is a real open source treasure. Every 3 months they put out a new release with an astounding array of new features. I've been meaning to learn it for like 20 years now, and every year I make a little more progress, but it's overwhelming!