One of the things that has been mentioned several times while discussing the distribution of plug-ins is the fact that the menus are too crowded, and new users can easily get lost. The user interface is indeed a significant problem, but I think that it should be handled separately from the packaging issues. Distributing fewer plug-ins in the core package would not solve the user interface problems. Having less plug-ins could help a bit on a single-user system, but not on multi-user systems because the administrator would sooner or later install most of the plug-ins anyway. So the users who start the Gimp after all plug-ins are installed would still be faced with the same problems as today (probably even worse because more plug-ins will be included in the additional packages). So in parallel with the discussion about the distribution of plug-ins, there should be a discussion about how to organize the menus. One idea that was proposed on this list some time ago was to be able to limit the number of things that are included in the menus. Some M$ applications offer reduced menus for beginners, and some GNOME applications allow you to select different levels of details (from novice to advanced user). Maybe we need something similar for the Gimp? I can think of four different levels of details for the menu: - Dumb user (oops, I mean beginner): only some basic operations are visible in the menus and in the toolbox, and the Gimp allows you to do as much as the venerable XPaint (or Windows Paint). - Apprentice: all core operations are visible, and only the plug-ins distributed in the core package are available. - Normal: all plug-ins are available. - Expert: some additional entries become available, such as the PDB browser, parasite editor and other things that are more interesting for a developer than for a normal user. Unfortunately, I do not know how this could be implemented. I am not so keen on the idea of overloading the menu strings with some characters that have a special meaning, but maybe this is the easiest solution (example: "%2" at the end of the string would mean that it should be displayed if the menus are configured for the apprentice level or more). Other suggestions are welcome... -Raphael
