On 8/29/07, Rob Church robchur@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