[Scribus] file format 1.3.3.x and 1.3.4

[Craig Bradney]

> ----- Original Message -----
> Subject: Re: [Scribus] file format 1.3.3.x and 1.3.4
> From: Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com>
> To: scribus at nashi.altmuehlnet.de
> Date: 30-11-2006 3:30
> 
> 
> 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.

It wasn't a disaster, and the format is text anyway so it would never have
been lost. You should not be attempting any production work with 1.3.4. Once
we release a 1.3.4 release candidate you should start to beat it with as
many tests as you can but until that day, and some of the issues are solved,
it can really just be used for tuning the text system and one off work. The
new text system was always going to be a long road given the rewrite that it
was. I am very happy that we have Andreas in the team who has put so much
work into it.

>
> 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 

It wasn't suddenly.. it was coming for a long time, and we released
1.3.3.->1.3.3.4 before we even said 1.2.x was deprecated and replaced by
1.3.3.5, and soon, 1.3.3.6.

> some people using one or the other in which case file sharing becomes a 
> potentially big problem.

This argument will never wash. If people are sharing for real work, then
they should use the stable version. Any serious producer will make sure that
the same versions exist everywhere and all are upgraded at the same time
after testing.

> 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.

File format changes are an inevitable fact of life, however you will always
be one up on a closed format. We do our very best to ensure that old files
going way way back are loadable. I know that we have files from Scribus 0.6
that still load (given they then need some tweaking). In the very worst
case, the files can manually be stripped of tags and converted back to text
and reimported, an impossible task with closed applications.

Regards
Craig