The Gimp is a remarkable application and GTK is a nice toolkit. Though the Gimp lacks many key features of a professional image developing application I believe that it has a greater potential than PhotoShop. Let's just say the Gimp is the best. That being said we must remember that it's not always the best product that survives. In order to survive we must be nice to our users. While the user maybe uneducated and wrong we must cater to them if doesn't jeopardize to integrity of the product. We must make it easy to download the GIMP and GTK everywhich way even if CVS is the way to go. We must try to answer every question that comes up. We must be attitude-free on our mailing lists. While the Gimp is the best, there are other applications out there which might do a particular job. (I still use XV as my image viewer of choice.) The casual user will ultimately use the one that's the easiest to use. He/She will not use the same feature in the Gimp of he/she doesn't know how to get to it. He/She will not use the Gimp if it's not easy to download. Or if it crashes for whatever reason (yes, the Gimp should never crash). Whatever is true for the Gimp goes doubly for Gtk. It would be nice to have Gtk as the go-to C toolkit. And this may simply not happen. The Gtk "api" in my opinion is not that great (ok, other tk's maybe worse). The callbacks are a pain in the neck. Graphical contexts are, too. Some things are defined constants others are literal strings. All the underscores and long macros and casts and huge argument lists make the code look ugly even in the hands of good developers. All of this maybe necessary for some reason. I'm not a gui pro so I don't know. But given the situation, the documentation and support must be better. I may not be a great programmer but I'm a pretty good and I after having written 2 plug-ins (which was 3 years ago when I was only beginning to program - so don't judge my skill by that code) I still haven't figured many things out (resizing, reparenting, memory leaks due to the reliance on pointers, colormaps, drawing). All too often I'm very tempted to look for another toolkit. (If java wasn't 100 times slower than C and didn't stink in other respect I'd be doing nothing but Swing.) I'm sure many other users are, too. We are not a commercial enterprise but we would be lying if we said that we don't care whether our tools are used. In fact, we would be lying if we said that we don't care whether the Gimp is considered the absolute best image application out there. Or whether it dominates "the market". Yes, developing the Gimp is a joy, using it is a joy, seeing it being used is a joy. But why don't we add another joy to list: Let's kick everybody's ass! Pavel PS: Oh yeah, the moral is this: we need to be more responsive, catering, and leave no question unanswered. I swear that if I knew answers to the questions being posted I would try and answer them all! And let's be attitude free. It will ultimately make us happier.
