Re: Fwd: Re: Comparative review of XML editors

On Monday 25 April 2005 19:34, David Malcolm wrote:
>
> Do we need a warning/disclaimer on the website to give a better
> indication of the unfinished state?

Well most people don't see the web site until they have already installed and 
have problems. They search Synaptic or YaST and go. The web site does say 
clearly that the "We are working towards our first stable release." I think 
it does however play down just how unstable it is at present. But that is a 
catch-22, dambed if you do and dambed if you don't.

I guess people see how long the project has been around and expect something 
different. they are disappointed, especially after reading such a great intro 
on the home page.

>
> > On many occasions I have recommended the the use of Conglomerate. The
> > responses, after trying it, have always come back in favor of XMLmind.
> > Statements I have received during IRC discussions with regard to
> > Conglomerate have included some trivial and some major issues:
> > * to slow in opening documents
>
> Needs optimisation, but needs bugfixing first :-(

When I said, the project lost its way. I think it is because the project has 
tried to eat the elephant in one meal instead of bite at a time. Perhaps 
aiming for a docbook editor with less customizability and more stability in 
the core editing functionality would at least get people to work with it on a 
regular basis. When this hapens the ideas flow, testing results and bugs get 
fixed. Focused addition of functionality is then easier by way of user 
requests and requirements.

>
> > * over complicates the editing process
> > * too many boxes and colors between text distracts me from writing
>
> Yeah.  Suggestions for improvements welcome.  Maybe we should take this
> to the GNOME usability-list?

That is a good idea.

> > * its the most stupid app, close and quit both terminate the application
> > when all I wanted to do was close the current document
>
> I wasn't aware of that bug; please bugzilla it.

done #301957

> > * it does not support basic stuff like entities and we use xinclude and
> > xpointer so I can't even read the whole document
>
> Please can you write a description of the features you want, and how
> they ought to work; ideally please file them in bugzilla so we can start
> working on them.

Sure. Will do on list first, then perhaps we can bugzilla the result of 
discussion?

>
> > * validation is bad on complex documents
>
> Do you mean that validation is wrong, or that the feature isn't usable
> enough (or both?).

Well I think, I don't remember what the users exact problem was with 
validation, but from my own experience I can validate a document containing 
external entities or xincludes with xmllint but cannot validate the same 
document in conglomerate.

If you want a large repos of docbook source for testing large complex 
documents I suggest you checkout 
svn://learnlinux.tsf.org.za/learnlinux/trunk and try validate on those 
documents.

> >
> > Oh yes, one person remarked that the web site was unhelpful and that they
> > saw
>
> Can you clarify what was meant by "the web site was unhelpful" please?

I am not actually sure why they said that. Perhaps it is because the site uses 
to many sentences and should rather just make more use of bullet points. 
Again, kinda guessing here.
One thing I think can help is to make the website look less like a document 
and more like a web site. Use of cols comes to mind. Hard to explain by I 
have a visual in my head :-)

> I'm sorry that you had those experiences.  We badly need more
> contributors, and we need everyone to have fun doing this (including
> me!).

It is gone and done, I am still here, just been lurking. I guess I share a 
passion for the main vision behind the project enough to do so. Most would 
not.

>
> > In a recent effort to try and understand the problems a user who had
> >  installed Conglomerate and was speaking about. Since I had not touched
> > the program in some time, I tried installing the latest release on SuSE
> > 9.2 and was met by the following error
> > conglomerate.rpm install failed
> > rpm output:
> > /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.26168: line 2: gconftool-2: command not found
> > error: %post(conglomerate-0.9.0-1.1.fc2.rf) scriptlet failed, exit status
> > 127
>
> The "fc2" in this line looks like it might be the problem; it look like
> you were either installing a package from Fedora Extras, or upgrading on
> top of one from Fedora Extras.  Where did you get the RPM from?

http://dag.wieers.com/packages/conglomerate/

I have installed FC2 RPMs before and had no problem.

I am not sure of the technical problem behind it. All I know is that it was 
hard for me and others unless we installed the version packaged with the 
distro. For example the version that comes with SuSE 9.2, just works 
(v0.7.14). But for 0.9.0 we had problems. Although, Conglomerate 0.9.0 did 
run after this error I am not sure if there is some functionality now missing 
or not being displayed because of this error. Any instability I found, I was 
not sure if it was because of this error or just that the app was wonky. :-)

-- 
Sean Wheller
[email protected]
http://www.enbaya.co.za