Daniel Egger's editorial has generated a lot of feedback. Many people are generally supportive of Mr. Egger's efforts, but there seems to be a sense of misinformation about the support. They are often qualified with "if what you are saying is true..." I'd like to provide some counterpoints and clarifications to his editorial. Mr. Egger's original text is in italics.
There isn't any real public discussion about changes. There are a few (so called) coredevelopers which seem to have their own communication channels and do changes at will.
The primary means of communication among core developers is via IRC, typically on irc.gimp.org port 6667, in channel #gimp. This has been the case since the release of 0.99.10 over a year ago. The channel is open to anyone who wants to participate. The people there are generally very technical and willing to help with user and developer GIMP questions.
Mr. Egger would do well to point out that in certain locations in Europe and elsewhere, continuous Internet connection is expensive and makes IRC impractical. However, he doesn't mention this, so perhaps he is simply unwilling to use IRC as a communication tool.
No schedules are proposed..
Free software projects don't often pick dates for releases. Development depends entirely on volunteer effort whose availability is completely unreliable and unpredictable. School, work, and other factors can cause delays in releases that make setting deadlines and schedules an exercise in futility.
The only possibility to be a bit up-to-date is to get a snapshot which is real a pain because often a recompile of some libs (gtk+, glib) is necessary to get GIMP running.
Even if there was a full-blown release of a development version of GIMP (1.1.0 for example), it would still necessitate recompiling GLIB and GTK. Development versions of GTK and GLIB are required for development versions of GIMP.
Developers which are non coredevelopers are left alone with their contributions.
There are some obvious counterexamples. Tor Lillqvist, who essentially ported GDK and GTK to Win32 on his own, is having his changes merged back into the main GIMP and GTK. He has been an active participant on the IRC channel and he is interested in managing his changes so they fit well into GIMP.
My idea to circumvent these problems is to split off development from the official tree ...
This doesn't seem like a logical way to improve communication between programmers. It sounds like it will actually harm communication by creating a rift between the people who have done the lion's share of work in making GIMP what it is today, and the folks who are upset because their patches aren't being incorporated when they want or with the feedback they want.
... and to create a place where interested people and programmer can meet.
This, on the other hand, is an excellent idea. If you have an alternative to IRC that is more inclusive, such as using the newly-created GIMP newsgroup or taking greater advantage of the mailing list, it would be far more beneficial for GIMP development than a split could ever be.
Zach Beane
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