On 12 Mar 2002, at 9:27, Tor Lillqvist wrote: > Branko Collin writes: > > I have not seen any announcement on www.gimp.org or this list, that > > is why I am asking: is GIMP for Windows 1.2.3 official? > > Umm, define "official"? Is GIMP for (pick your random Unix system) > official? Which of the prebuilt GIMPs for Solaris (I assume there are > several) is official? IMHO, the official GIMP release is the source > release. : 'And you?' she said, turning to Sam.'For this is what your folk : would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly : what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the : deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of : Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-Magic?' (Galadriel to Sam in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings) > I am just a person who makes prebuilt binaries available for Windows, > and somebody else then makes an installer out of them. (I also happen > to be the guy who did most of the porting to Windows, but that's > irrelevant IMHO.) There are dozens of GIMP packagings for typical > Linux distributions, for instance, and none of them is "official" > other than from *that distribution's* point of view. Thus, *my* > prebuilt GIMP builds are official for *me*. As if that meant anything? Erm, yes, you're right, and I should have known that myself. Yet, to the millions of Windows users, terms like build, distribution, source, binary et cetera are completely opaque and they do see things in terms of 'official' and 'unofficial'. For them, it is handy to know that _your_ version (the only one a non-programmer can use, as far as I know) has left beta. That is as official as it gets. So even though I was wrong, there is still value in announcing your latest version as being 'ready' (whatever that may mean). > > Also: does this mean the GIMP for Windows' bugs that were still > open > are now resolved? I filed the snoise bug report, but have not > seen > that bug report closed in Bugzilla. > > Sorry, I know I am a bit lazy in checking bugzilla. That is fine, it just added to the confusion. ;-) > The problem you > were seeing was caused by that described in Bug#67386, and yes, that > has been fixed. (That fix, however, is not in CVS, as it is somewhat > ugly, or at least the comments I got about that bug report indicated > it might be frowned upon, and I didn't want to take the chance of > delaying the official GIMP 1.2.3 (source) release any further back > then when I did it. See the link to the diffs from > www.gimp.org/win32/downloads.html.) > > > If so, I would like to send out a press-release about this to > digital > photography magazines. > > Please do, but tell them it's their job to determine how useful the > software is to users... They can't just expect some > marketing-department-created press release praising the software and > listing its features, from which to copy-paste ;-) How can I tell grown-ups what to believe and what not to believe? My biggest challenge will be to come up with a news worthy fact to center such a press release around. But the GIMP has not been much in the press lately, and I do not think it would harm to point out the increased stability and user-friendlyness of the 1.2.x branch at this point. And, as I said, for us it would not be bad to ride the wave of the digital camera. I will put up my press release somewhere for all gimpsters to comment on before I send it off. -- branko collin collin@xxxxxxxxx
