[Scribus] file format 1.3.3.x and 1.3.4

[Gregory Pittman]

Craig Bradney wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 November 2006 23:28, Axel Bojer wrote:
>   
>> Louis Desjardins skrev:
>>     
>>> Just a thought on Greg's idea. I wonder whether saving in an older
>>> format would be as good as it seems. Does that still make sense from the
>>> free software point of view? Anyone wishing to upgrade can do so at no
>>> cost. If a user come across a file the app can't open, it means the app
>>> should be upgraded. That's it. We have lots of reflexes from the old
>>> world.
>>>       
1. On a small scale, here is what happened to me. I started working on a 
simple, one page, all text newsletter that I put together for a 
conference. The last time I had used 1.3.4, it seemed that it should be 
usable for that purpose, so I decided to try it out. It wasn't long 
before I realized that much of the text manipulation wasn't workable, so 
I went back out to 1.3.3.x and tried to load the file. Not a major 
disaster, I just saved the text I had entered and salvaged the situation.

2. On a bigger scale, I think we just look at the situation with the 
jump from 1.2.x to 1.3.3.x. We went for the longest time with the party 
line being that "1.2.x is the stable version, that's the one you should 
use for production work" but as time went on, the quality of 1.3.3.x 
improved, and there were more and more features in 1.3.3.x that you 
really wanted, there may have still been the mantra that 1.2.x was the 
stable version, but people were using 1.3.3.x more of the time. Suddenly 
one day, 1.3.3.x is pronounced stable. In the meantime, you might have 
some people using one or the other in which case file sharing becomes a 
potentially big problem.
Many of us on the list have (at least) 2 or 3 versions of Scribus at our 
disposal, but as Scribus becomes more widely adopted, many may just have 
one.

3. These file format disconnects is one of the issues that Microsoft 
catches a lot of flak about. Surely, Scribus can do better than that.

Greg