[Gimp-developer] SoC project ideas

[Sven Neumann]

Hi,

I have read through the list at http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/SummerOfCode
and I think we need to triage the list and try to come up with fewer but
more detailed proposals. Here are some comments to get us started:

Color management
  I guess it's up to me to come up with a more detailed proposal here.

Resource management
  This looks like a nice project but perhaps needs to be specified 
  better.

Create an SDI manager widget
  Do we really want to ask someone to waste his/her time with this? It 
  is in my opinion not implementable in a sane way and we would likely
  not accept the results then. If this is supposed to be kept on the
  list then we need to agree first that we really want such a thing.

Plug-in stability effort 
  The proposal concentrates on possible crashes when plug-ins are passed
  invalid PDB data. Is that really an issue that is worth working on? It
  would probably be a lot more worthwhile to improve the PDB API and to
  add better checks in libgimp.

Additional file format plug-ins 
  Shouldn't this perhaps be titled "Improve MNG support"?

On-canvas text editing 
  Nice, but pretty much depends on the port of the display code to
  Cairo. Perhaps concentrate more on rich text support instead of
  focusing on the on-canvas editing?

Search-based menu browser
  Nice and probably even reasonably well specified. The student should
  perhaps do some usability work on this him/herself (with the help
  of an expert).

Unified UI for scripting 
  I don't understand this proposal. We provide unified widgets for this
  in libgimpui and our scripting interfaces use them (well, perhaps
  Perl-Fu doesn't). So the look and feel should already be pretty much
  the same. IMO this proposal is based on wrong assumptions. Perhaps
  what's really needed is a maintainer for perl-fu.

Redesign and reimplementation of Save and Export in GIMP. 
  We really need to do this, finally.

Unit testing framework
  Tests are definitely needed but we might want to make it clearer what
  exactly needs testing. 

Meta-data plug-in 
  I would love to see the metadata plug-in finished and the framework
  used from other file plug-ins. This is crucial for 2.6. Probably up to
  Raphael to decide if making it a SoC project can help to make this
  happen.

Work on GEGL 
  Needs a more detailed spec, perhaps even a list of proposed projects.

SVG brushes 
  Sounds like a nice project for the SoC.

Benchmarking 
  The text for this does IMO focus too much on the actual optimization
  work while it should probably focus more on what we expect from a
  benchmarking framework. Should probably also include regression
  testing as it helps a lot to also have a regression test when doing
  optimizations.


Sven