Hi, a lot of you folks will go into XMas holidays soon and I thought it might be nice to give a status report on the current development so you have something to think about. So here's a short summary made up from the ChangeLog entries since 1.3.1 was released (about four weeks ago): Bex did a lot of message proofreading. Daniel optimized and cleaned up the paint-funcs system. He also fixed some problems with our Makefiles. Guillermo helped finishing the task of switching all dialog buttons over to the button ordering for GTK+-2.0. Kelly did something to the undo and pixel-region systems that will hopefully just work since anyone else is afraid to touch this code. Mitch started a massive cleanup of the tools and display subsytems. The whole image <-> display coordinates calculation does happen in the display layer now and tools don't need to care. Mitch also exposed a lot of hidden tool options in the tool options dialogs and gave them a nicer look and feel. Mitch did some menu reorganization. This needs more thought and work. Mitch reenabled brush pipes which used to be broken in the 1.3 tree. Mitch did this and Mitch did that ... I have started a rewrite of the gimprc code and it's already pretty mature but still unused. The idea of the new system is to have an interface for object serialization and deserialization that can easily be implemented by any object. The easiest way is to define everything that needs to be de/serialized as object properties and use the default implementation from GimpConfig. The file format written and parsed is still sexpressions (the thing with lots of brackets) because I think it is a well-suited format for our config files and Glib has a nice parser for it (GScanner). Some stuff needs still to be done, but I hope to be able to remove gimprc.[ch] from the app directory soon. I have started to change our internally used enums so they use a GIMP namespace just as their counterparts in the libgimp API do. This involved touching lots of files, but the actual changes were minimal. Other contributors: David Neary, David Odin, Roger Leigh, Ville Pätsi. There were more changes and most probably even a few important ones that I forgot. If you care, why don't you read the ChangeLog yourself? It looks as if the GTK+ folks are preparing the 1.3.12 release and we will try to get GIMP 1.3.2 out shortly after. If you are in middle europe between XMas and the end of the year, why don't you visit Mitch, Simon and me at the Chaos Communication Congress 18C3 where we hope to get some nice GIMP hacking done. Check the website for more infos: http://www.ccc.de/congress/2001/. Salut, Sven
