[Gimp-developer] on moving toward a 2.4 release

[Robert L Krawitz]

   Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 09:09:44 -0700
   From: "William Skaggs" <weskaggs at primate.ucdavis.edu>

   GIMP 2.0 was released on March 23, 2004, and then GIMP 2.2 on
   December 19, 2004.  This was a 9 month release cycle, which is
   quite reasonable.  Howver, it has been over a year and a half since
   the 2.2 release, and we are still not visibly nearing a 2.4
   release.  This slow progress is holding up important things,
   including, especially, GEGL integration.  What can be done?

Compared with us (Gutenprint), that's still positively speedy.

GIMP 2.2 is a great application, albeit with some serious limitations
(no 16-bit support, etc.).  I'd personally prefer to see you folks
take more time -- even quite a bit more time -- to get it right rather
than try to rush a release.  Keep doing 2.2-based releases with
incremental functionality while working on a next generation release
that will really improve matters.

I was hoping that we'd be able to do our followon to Gimp-Print 4.2
within 12-18 months, but it didn't work out that way -- it was more
like 4.5 years between Gimp-Print 4.2 and Gutenprint 5.0.  There was a
lot of churn along the way, but we rearchitected a lot of the
internals to come up with a really general option system and a fully
orthogonal 16-bit internal architecture (i. e. all of the input types
we accept are capable of both 8 and 16 bits).  Doing that design --
along with beating the color architecture into shape -- simply took a
lot of time.

If GEGL integration really is a hard problem, it's going to come out a
lot better if you take the time to do it right rather than rushing
it.  I'd like to see a 16-bit GIMP as much as anyone -- it's a
critical part of a RAW-based workflow, and it's needed for HDR
imaging, which is something I'd really like to try -- but it's going
to be a lot better if it's done right.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton