Re: Feature request

[Valentin Villenave]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Tim McNamara <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hmm.  This is prompting a rather harsh reaction from me which will
> predictably draw all kinds of flames.  I am always bemused by the recurrent
> user-dismissive attitude that pervades Unix-based FOSS projects:  "Whaddya
> mean you don't want to use a kludgy command and you want something neat and
> elegant instead?"

I'm afraid you didn't get the point I was trying to make.

I am precisely the one who has recently been spending ONE full-time
BLOODY WEEK just to make sure that in 2.14 people won't have to type

   \include "italiano.ly"

but something like:

  \language "italiano"

So, believe me, I'm with on you on the "intuitive, neat and elegant"
side. (Which makes Graham's answer quite ironic indeed.)

What I did mean, however, is that your average user doesn't even know
what SVG is, let alone how to obtain it. If we *did* open a feature
request, if anything, I'd make it a bit more ambitious: why limit
ourselves to SVG? For example, how come that one has to type -fpng and
not --png? How come that tagline isn't automatically disabled, and
mogrify -trim isn't invoked automatically when compiling short
examples? etc.

And finally, as you pointed out (and rightfully so), there are quite a
few other areas where we could, and should, be more user-friendly.
Some of which may be more pressing than the SVG backend. (Which
doesn't prevent us from opening a feature request in the tracker right
now, granted.)

Cheers,
Valentin.