I think we can start looking forward to the future soon. Mitch and Sven are making real progress in there. Hopefully at some point they can start outlining what is going on and making it clear what others can do to get involved. I am guessing that once the base structure is changed all plug-ins and such will need to be rewritten. We will also need to redo all the docs. I think that the near future should have lots of opportunities for people to get involved and the changes should improve the code structure, the UI, and I18N. The problem is that Mitch and Sven are busy making GIMP so I don't want to bug them to write something, but they might be the only ones who can. If someone else can, it would be a good idea. I think we need some kind of outline of what is being done and why and where it is going. Developers need to know where and how they can get involved. Some kind of list of things that need to be done and support for people with less experience. Making new plug-ins won't really help right now. GIMP needs to be ready for it. So if Mitch and Sven can somehow work out a bit of an outline for interested developers, that would be good. I'd be happy to help flesh it out and clean up the English, but I'm no hacker. When GIMP hits the usable point, I think we need to consider doing some more interactive bug things.. to get the user base involved in testing and fixing and cleaning. Some Bug Days with people to help newer users submit bug reports and get users involved in reproducing bugs and tracking down required additional info. I would also hypothesize that we have old plug-ins that need new maintainers. Some of the cleaning out plug-in stuff will be based on if someone is maintaining it. So if beginning developers out there have a favorite plug-in, find out if it is being actively maintained. If not, start learning the code. The UIs will need to be cleaned up for sure.. the old gimp looks like a lot of different pieces stapled together (which it sounds like it was). I think the new GIMP needs to be more uniform so users can find their way around more easily. I'm not a programmer, but I can help with proofreading strings before they get translated and I can help with testing. Okay.. this is semicoherant. But I think everyone who loves GIMP owes Mitch and Sven a round of applause (and probably beer, since I think they'd like that better). Mitch, Sven.. when you have time.. Can you make a to do for developers that want to help? bex
