[scribus-dev] issues

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

Hi again,

Since Louis is unsubscribed now, I'll gladly make matters even worse.
It's about time I did so.

There are several real problems with this project as I see them. And
since I'm in a bastard mode again I will ignore every comment whose
author tells me I'm wrong, because telling me so in presence of solid
facts is even more evil than my arrogant behavior, and that took some
special training, miind you. Which means I'll probably have to ignore
99% of Christoph's reply, but I'm perfectly fine with that. I didn't
take pains of growing up and getting a life to become a nice guy.

Let's go.

1. Lack of communication to users. The project doesn't understand and
doesn't make an effort to understand its community.

You don't know who your users are. The proof of that is that this
project doesn't really focus on anybody. You can't use Scribus to
substitute MS Publisher, because it lacks polishing for inexperienced
users. You can't use it to substitute XPress or ID, because it lacks
features that make production fast and uncluttered. Yes, the project
has a number of users who are stubborn enough to be in either of these
groups (there is no sense telling me there are more groups, this is
not the point). So okay, there actually is a focus group of Scribus --
stubborn fanatics. Other people just quit using Scribus. As a
community leader here in .ru I see it way too often.

Opaque development efforts. The project is known from its very
beginning as a project where development happens under closed doors.
Nobody cares that this isn't really so, because you don't communicate
it to people. Nobody cares if you lack time or skill to communicate it
to people. You don't do it ergo worst and wildest misconceptions about
the project are true. Fix it or live with it. Examples: very little
was told about GSoC projects and how they went, after bloody two
months nothing is officially known about OIF project, nothing was told
about developers meeting in Paris or wherever it happened recently,
and nothing ever is told about new things under development (no, few
cases in rants.scribus.net don't count as such).

Scarce news. This really doesn't need any special notice. Go to
www.scribus.net and see for yourself: 8 news in 11 months this year,
and only one of them not about a new version. Have you really got
nothing else to tell your users? Really? Now go to inkscape.org and
you'll see why someone in a gimp's mailing list said "I wish we were
like Inkscape" regarding news on the website (yes, I'm rather proud of
that). Before you comment on that, see end of the mail for more
positive things.

Showcases. How do you know if this is a useful project without trying
it? From pretty pictures. Try finding showcases on the website.
Visitors couldn't give a damn that you know where the secret wiki page
is. If there is no dedicated, well organized section linked from
(preferably) menu on the main page, then this section doesn't exist.
Whether you like it or not. What *is* there instead is an ugly dated
Screenshots page. For heaven's sake, Scribus is a *production* tool:
show magazines, show books, show leaflets -- beautiful, solid stuff
that sends the message. And btw, Scribus 1.2.x screenshots? Stuff it.

Downloads. When did you last look at http://www.scribus.net/downloads?
What kind of person wants downloading source code, SVN snapshots,
templates and scripts in the first place? Why don't you study what
people really download? Just how much time does it take to go to
http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/ and look at numbers?
Let me do it for you:

scribus section has 512,468 downloads
scribus-devel section has 271,676 downloads
templates have 5,899 downloads

Are SVN snapshots same important as stable? Clearly not. Maybe
templates are? You've got to be kidding me.

How about operation systems?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus/1.3.3.14/

SuSE RPMS 144 downloads
Source code 9,027 downloads
Windows build 450,808 downloads

And Windows build is in "Other Operating Systems:" section far at the
right side? While outnumbering everything by order of magnitudes? Any
person who at this point tells me the project understands its
community should have his head examined.

Now look further below at http://www.scribus.net/downloads. Do you
really think that the huge stupid Download Items section is of any
help? Do we download CentOS? Or Mandriva? Or Windows, for what it's
worth? What purpose does it serve but puzzling and annoying people?

Well, at least the team started publishing a human readable list of
changes in release notes. Thank you, Christoph.

2. There is nothing special about the project. Yes, you (we) all
devoted a hell of a time to Scribus. But guess what -- nobody cares.
The only thing one can say about Scribus is that it's free. Try naming
three innovative things that make Scribus stand out. No, this isn't
evil marketing jargon, this is how people see it: they need something
else apart from the "free" bit to convince them that Scribus will help
the get the job done really fast. No matter how hard I try I can't
think of any feature that boosts production. Sure, you had preflight
verifier. Now ID CS5 has it too. End of story.

3. The focus of developers is scattered. Just a year ago you kept
working on three branches: Qt3 based version where only maintenance
happened, 1.3.x and 1.5. Obviously you didn't have manpower to do it,
but you did it anyway. Did it teach you anything? Obviously not,
because now you have three branches again: 1.3.x-1.4, 1.5 and OIF. Who
is this good for? Who benefits from that? And besides you are buried
in bug reports. Yes, you are a small team, but if you keep focusing on
small things that don't matter much instead of fixing big issues, you
will only keep losing community and not making a splash. Not that I
didn't appreciate how fast Franz uncluttered gradients UI in 1.5.0svn
after my report (and even then it still needs a lot of work).

I don't think I want to go in details about how Scribus lacks this or
that feature or should have fixed another or shouldn't change file
format that often, otherwise I'll never get this mail finished.

Now, being agressive doesn't mean I'm of no use. I still volunteer to
write news for the website. Maybe if I say so for the 100th time you
will finally sort this out. Until then the existing twitter account
will be the only alive channel of communicating news to users. And
even then my hands are somewhat tied, because no matter how many times
I say that development news should be published, you find perfect
excuses to prevent that from happening while letting things like
http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/news/scribus-re-loaded happen.

I can also volunteer to work on initial version of the showcase
section, but you have to understand that showcases are an entirely
dynamic thing. Keeping same stuff for ages and never adding anything
new is worse than sin. If you can't or don't want to do things like
that, at least quit stopping others to help you.

Alexandre