Editorial by Daniel Egger
As you may have seen, I recently brought a little bit of freshness into the
GIMP community by speculating about some changes in GIMP development.
The reasons for that can hardly be overseen:
- 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. Neither the publicity hearing to the
official mailinglist nor readers of the homepage are really informed what's
going on. The only possibility to "see" the changes is getting the CVS tree
weekly and guess what the rarely used ChangeLog entries mean.
- No schedules are proposed. It seems like users have to stay with old
versions of the GIMP as there are no real plans of the next release.
New versions are appearing very seldom and even non coredevelopers are
sometimes surprised why a certain version should be the final version.
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.
- Developers which are non coredevelopers are left alone with their
contributions. It isn't very seldom that ftp.gimp.org contains patches that
are 3 months old. Although committed correctly they are lying on that
server and no one of the important persons cares about them which is
really a pity because even other programmers are able to write code which
is worth being added to the GIMP. It seems to be clear that such ignorance
isn't a motivation for other developers and so it's no wonder that progress
isn't recogniseable at the moment.
My idea to circumvent these problems is to split off development from the
official tree and to create a place where interested people and programmer can
meet.
My homepage is just the beginning. At the moment it looks a bit
strange I know but that will change with time being. You'll find
there (http://members.tripod.de/gimp)
my own tree which and a patch set against the latest official
tree. Really soon this page will contain some further additions such
as some new ideas by me (proposals to follow on the official
mailinglists), some patches from ftp.gimp.org and of course bugfixes.
Anyone who feels able to provide some code (tested or not.... it doesn't
matter), any new ideas, proposals or bugreports should feel free to contact
me at Daniel.Egger@t-online.de.
I'm also in search for ftp and http space and a CVS server machine.
ed Feedback from this editorial has prompted me to write up
a reply
to some of Mr. Egger's points.
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