Now that GUADEC is over and everyone’s back home, you will probably want to know what has been happening related to GIMP at this year’s GUADEC in Stuttgart. Let me try to give a short summary of the GIMP meeting we had on Monday.
About a dozen people were present at the meeting. We haven’t made a list but off the top of my head I remember Mitch, Michael Schumacher, Øyvind Kolås, Simon Budig, Raphael Quinet, Karine Delvare and her husband, David Odin and me. I know I missed someone. Please bear with me, I suck at remembering names...
Picking up on the discussion about Sourcewear that we had on this list earlier, we talked about merchandising. I had the impression that everyone was rather happy about the solution that we found on the mailing-list. We agreed that we don’t need an official merchandiser but that it is a good thing to link to shops that support the GIMP project.
It was shortly discussed on how the money that is raised by donations or from other sources should be spent. Problems with the mailing-list server were mentioned, but without Yosh being around we weren’t able to tell if money could help to improve this. We seemed to agree that the money should primarily be spent to bring together the people working on GIMP. We think that it helps GIMP if money is used to help contributors to attend the next GimpCon. This can also be seen as some sort of reward for the active contributors and thus can serve a similar role as a bounty.
Everyone agreed that we should have another GimpCon soon, if possible still this year. This needs a suitable location and people willing to organize the event. A possible location would be Lyon, France where David Odin has good connections to the university. He said he will investigate for possible dates. If you can think of other locations (Ottawa, Canada was mentioned), please tell us about it.
The roadmap for GIMP was discussed shortly. We would like to get GIMP 2.4 out soon. The plan is to finish what has been started in the development branch. This should be doable over the summer. This means that 2.4 will have color management but we aren’t going to try larger changes such as adding support for higher bit depths.
We agreed though that 8bit is not going to get us much further and that we need to pick up on GEGL again. The GEGL source tree had been abandoned for a while, the last commit dating back to March 2004. We found that in order to make further plans, we first need to get an overview on the current state of the code. Mitch, Pippin and me decided that we will spend the next days cleaning up the code in GEGL,
evaluating it and making plans. That’s what we’ve been doing during the last days. More on that later...
The menu reorganisation effort was raised. It seems that Akkana’s proposal is widely accepted. The proposed patch can be improved but it is a good start. If Akkana or someone else has time and motivation to continue to work on this, then the patch can be committed right away.
GUADEC rocked hard this year and it was a pleasure to meet so many great people.
So... in summary: GIMP 2.4.0 will have proper colour management, GEGL is alive again, and GIMP 3.0 will feature n-bit n-channel colour (256-bit CMYK if your furry little heart desires).
If you think this is a noble cause, mail sven at gimp org and ask him what he most needs done. And join the list, too.
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