On 8/29/07, Rob Church <robchur(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think the point Mark was making was that a wrapper
around
ImageMagick is capable of doing all these things.
Definitely.
We don't have to integrate this at all.
True.
Picnic's solution is horrible and proprietary,
It's "proprietary", yes, and closed source at that. What's
"horrible"
about it, though? It's a lot nicer than the GUI we were just comparing
it to.
and not something we want to commit ourselves to
implement support
for,
Who is "we" and "ourselves"? If someone wrote an integration patch
for
it, would that be accepted into the mainline? Would it be enabled for
Wikipedia?
not least of all because the MediaWiki community as a
whole will
roundly reject it.
Why would they do that? Do we have a rule against integration with
proprietary software?
When it comes down to it, some clever person can write
a nice UI that
exposes this functionality and makes it comfortable for the end user.
There are almost certainly people who are experienced enough with
MediaWiki development who can make this sort of thing happen.
Examples of great GUIs written for free and released as open source
are not numerous. I don't doubt that someone could hack a front end
onto ImageMagick. I think producing an elegant WYSIWYG GUI would be a
major undertaking, and no one has yet volunteered to make it happen.
So, as before, our choices aren't really between integrating with
Picnik or doing it ourselves, because the latter option is unlikely to
actually happen. The more feasible choice is between integrating with
Picnik or doing nothing at all, and having no online image
manipulation. Which do you think is preferable?
Steve