ShapeSet

Webs: Faemalia -:- Greatprawn -:- Playground -:- Technical -:- Tweak Technical Web Sections: Register -:- Users -:- Changes -:- Index -:- Search -:- Statistics

It's wonderful that we're getting a number of new shape collections into Dia. However, it will facilitate their inclusion if they are submitted in such a way that we can easily incorporate it into the Dia sources. Here are some pointers to what you can do to ease the process.

We'll assume that you are making the new sheet call Foobar. You have a set of .shape and .png files in the shapes/Foobar directory, and a sheet (possibly made with the Sheets & Objects dialog) called Foobar.sheet in the sheets directory.

First you need to make sure the shapes are correctly included. You will need to do the following:

• Add "Foobar" to the SUBDIRS line in shapes/Makefile.am.
• Add a Makefile.am to the shapes/Foobar directory (just copy one from another shape directory and edit the shapedir and SHAPES entries).
• Add the shapes/Foobar/Makefile entry to the toplevel configure.in script (in proper alphabetic place, please).

Next you should incorporate the sheets file and make it easy for the translators:

• Add "Foobar.sheet" to the sheet_in_files entry in sheets/Makefile.am.
• Rename your "Foobar.sheet" to "Foobar.sheet.in".
• In "Foobar.sheet.in", replace all <name> tags with <_name> tags (as well as the tags, of course) and replace all <description> tags with <_description> tags.

Now your things are all ready to go. To ship it, you should first create a diff for the standard files that you changed. We'll assume that you have a pristine copy of the sources in dia-old and your new modified sources in dia.

cd ..
diff -uRbB dia-old dia >Foobar.diff

Then make a tar file with all the new files and the diff:

tar -czf Foobar.tar.gz Foobar.diff dia/sheets/Foobar.sheet.in dia/shapes/Foobar

Finally, go to bugzilla.gnome.org and create a new bug report for Dia, using the group shapes, attaching the .tar.gz file and adding the keyword PATCH. That'll make sure your contribution doesn't get lost in all the other stuff that comes our way, but ends up nice and safe in the Dia sourcecode (assuming it's of good enough quality, of course).

-- LarsClausen - 10 Mar 2004