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Since Dia is maintained on a volunteer basis, there's no fixed plan for when what will be done, nor can we tell anybody to code specific parts.  Thus, the development tends to happen where people get annoyed enough with the current state that they do something about it.  Which is fine.  We (the maintainers) are happy to get contributions; however, we will not automatically add any patch we're sent.  We would like potential contributors to take a look at our Apps/Dia/CodingGuidelines first and Apps/Dia/HowToSubmitPatches second; following these will dramatically increase your change of having your patch accepted.

Current state

People are using Dia to draw a variety of technical diagrams.  Please try Dia out and tell us what you think of it.  Check out the code too, you might even want to contribute...

The file format is XML based since 0.30, so it's pretty easy to keep backwards compatible.  We'll do our best to make new versions load older files; no guarantees the other way, though.

We develop under i386 Linux (Ubuntu) and gtk+ 2.0, and it works for us ™.  Dia is known to run on several Linux/Unix variations, MacOS X, and Windows; installation packages are available from the Download page.  If you have successfully tried it on some other architecture, please tell us.

For those interested in helping out, or curious about what's currently going on, we try to keep up a page with current development.  For those who feel like adding something of their own, there's a page of potential development with features we'd like to get but don't have anyone looking at yet.

Developing

Dia is designed to be very flexible. Diagram types are scanned for and loaded at runtime from dynamic libraries. In the future we hope many different kinds of diagram types will exist. Things like JSP diagrams, block diagrams, organization charts, whatever. If you want to help with this, please contact us.

Dia development takes place in GNOME GIT. Please read the notes and guidelines on the rest of this page (and follow the links to other pages) before contributing to Dia.

The latest changes are listed at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/dia/commits/master. You may also want to take a look at Dia's issue tracker to track the current state. The top of the News page has a link to the list of features that have already been added in GIT for inclusion in the next release.

The following command:

can be used to get a copy of the most recent sources.

For more developer resources, see http://dia-installer.de/developer/index.html.en

Development documentation

Generic information

Apps/Dia/CodingGuidelines

Apps/Dia/HowToSubmitPatches

Specific parts

Apps/Dia/Undo

Apps/Dia/Win32

Roadmap

The roadmap towards version 2.0 is laid out below. Of course, since all the work is done by volunteers, it may turn out otherwise, but these are the areas that the maintainers feel should be focused on first.

0.98

0.99

2.00

Other ideas bubbling around: OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and OmniGraffle file format support. Rotation, possibly just of text. LaTeX support in the form of in-diagram display of rendered LaTeX.

UML support

The UML support is quite extensive; all of the static structure diagram parts are done. In the future, support for other kinds of UML diagrams will come.

The core UML objects are the only ones left that don't use the standard properties API, but rather define their own GTK dialogs. This needs to change, and the only missing part is a property that handles arbitrary-length lists of properties.

For future work on UML, here's a presentation explaining UML:  06-UMLAndClasses.pdf (downloaded from http://decomp.ulb.ac.be:9090/Courses/glp0506/06-UMLAndClasses.pdf)

Network diagrams

Dia can be used to draw diagram of LANs and WANs. At the moment, very few objects usable for drawing these diagrams are implemented; there is more to come.

Other diagram types

Dia currently also supports Entity-Relationship diagrams, flowcharts, Sybase database diagrams, electric circuit diagrams, GRAFCET, IDEF0, and much more.

Google Summer of Code

Ideas for submission to Googles Summer of Code, and for general development. These may be out of date

Rotation (maybe with scaling, too)

Better autorouting

Full dockability

Embeddability

Mailing List

There is a mailing list for discussions about the design, development, and usage of Dia. See the Contact page for more details.

Bugs

See the Contact page for how to submit bug reports.

Authors

This program was originally programmed by Alexander Larsson, alla@lysator.liu.se.  The current maintainer is Zandar Brown.  Steffen Macke maintained the Win32 installer: we are looking for a new maintainer for our future releases.

The following persons have in some way contributed:

Dia is documented by:

2024-10-23 10:58