Hi, "Branko Collin" <collin@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Ouch. :-) I was writing a lengthy reply here, but I realised that I > could probably sum it up as follows. When deciding what to include > and what to leave out, you probably should also keep some vague, non- > objective criteria in mind. Actually, defining descriptive and > objective criteria might prove impossible. What I am arguing for is > to include a few plug-ins that may not seem to have much value for > the average user, but that help set apart GIMP from its competition, > help inspire plug-in writers and that are just fun to have. A good > example would be Gee-Zoom. heh, Gee-Zoom is just the 1.0 easter-egg surfaced to the menus for 1.2. We will certainly continue to include easter-eggs. Actually we are not talking about shipping Gimp with less plug-ins. We just don't want to put them all in one package. Most users will choose to install a lot (if not all) plug-in packages and might decide to remove some from their menus later. > Can't we use the Debian tool? Debian users will certainly want to use apt-get and dselect to get their plug-ins, RedHat/SuSE users want their RPMs, a lot of people will want to install from source and I think we should let them all do just that. > Also, it seems to me that this whole things depends on finding enough > maintainers. Judging by the state of the web site (parts of it have > not been kept up-to-date for a while now) that is going to be the > real hard thing to do. I always wondered why noone stands up and volunteers to take over the website maintainance. But it looks as if everyone gets bored doing web stuff really soon... > Finally, you may not be able to get around distributing binaries too. > Windows users are not used to making their software packages, they > want tools that install the libraries for them ready to run. We have never focused on binaries. We try to make it easy for other people to build binary packages and we support them by putting them up on ftp.gimp.org. We do not have the resources to build binary packages for everyone and that's the reason why I think we shouldn't invent a new binary distribution system for gimp plug-ins. Windows users will have to find someone who builds binary packages for them just as the Unix users do. I'm sure there will always be someone who builds binaries and is willing to share them. Salut, Sven
