[Gimp-developer] changes in script-fu in 2.3.14

[Michael Natterer]

On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 09:33 +0100, gg at catking.net wrote:

> One thing that concerns me with Gimp development in general and of which  
> these changes are a good example is lack of concern for backwards  
> compatability.
> 
> A lot of people have contributed in one way or another to gimp over time  
> but that does not mean they will always be here or be able to provide  
> never ending support for things , like a plugin, they have contributed.  
> There was a powerful suite of plugins written by a German maths doctor  
> that got dropped a long time back. It seemed, having done the job once ,  
> he did not have the time to redo it when gimp decided to change the  
> interface.

What interface change do you mean? The plug-in API and ABI are
supposed to be backward-compatible. Any incompatibility you find is
a bug that will be fixed.

> There is also problems with the way changes broke the interface with  
> gimp=print, amongst other things. Gimp 2.3 is still seriously unfinished  
> as far as the print dlg goes yet it seems I still cannot use gutenprint  
> with 2.2 . Net result I can't use my printer with gimp. As I understood  
> that rather contentious exchanges between Sven and the gp lead dev this  
> was because there were incompatible changes in the API. (If there's a way  
> around this please correct me, and please do not take this as an attempt  
> to reopen the heated arguements this issue invovled. The issue is that of  
> continuity vs breakage).

What keeps you from using the gutenprint gimp plug-in? All stable gimp
versions have a working print plug-in. The developer version being
broken in some areas is something you just have to live with.

> There are quite obvious issues with running everything in the same name  
> space. Surely the best way to address this issue would be to run a  
> separate instance of the interpreter rather than put new conditions on the  
> scripts that breaks a number of the ones in the registry and very likely  
> at lot that are not. This would seem to be a work around for a flaw in the  
> way gimp handles this.

The script-fu incompatibility issues you raise are due to the fact that
we switched from the totally antique and unmaintained SIOD to something
sane. I hope you don't want to get back to SIOD and re-introduce all
its shortcomings.

> Since this is one of your goals anyway , wouldn't it save a lot of effort  
> all round and preserve a number of plugins that may not get ported across,  
> if this could be brought forward?

Are you talking about plug-ins or script-fu scripts?

ciao,
--mitch