Hi, Right up front, I'd like to say that as far as I'm concerned the 1.3+ debate is closed. I'm happy with 2.0, but even if I weren't I don't think the version number is a big deal. This mail is about other stuff... Nathan Carl Summers wrote: > On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Sven Neumann wrote: > > First of all, Mitch and me are not willing to raise the 2.0 versus 1.4 > > discussion again. > > Gimp is more than "Mitch and me," isn't it? Well, I would have said it a little more tactfully, maybe with more than 2 names, but let's look, shall we? dave@bolsh:/usr/local/src/gimp-1.3$ grep mitch ChangeLog | wc -l 1174 dave@bolsh:/usr/local/src/gimp-1.3$ grep Sven ChangeLog | wc -l 1004 dave@bolsh:/usr/local/src/gimp-1.3$ grep '^[^ ]' ChangeLog | wc -l 2724 So between them they're responsible for 2178/2724 commits in the 1.3 branch, or 80%. Granted not all of those are commits - so it's probably more like 75%. Third place is 109 (yosh). Then comes Maurits with 108, then (in no particular order) nomis, myself, pedro, rockwalrus, jimmac, Hans Breuer, Daniel Egger, sjburges, Raphael and tml. That brings us down to people who have 10 commits or fewer in the last 3 years. That's it - over 90% of the stuff in 1.3 has been written by 14 people, and the vast majority of that has been written by 2 people. It's interesting that you brought this up, by the way - I've been thinking for a while about the problems that the gimp has been facing, and why. The problems as I see them are 1) User feedback on the development series is poor 2) Documentation is poor 3) Our release cycle is poor 4) UI is not a priority. I think 1, 2 and 3 are related. As are 1 and 4. Those are the problems at the philosophical level. At the practical level, the problems are: 1) Not enough users use bugzilla to report bugs 2) Not enough developers use Bugzilla to find out what bugs need fixing 3) Not enough developers hear user complaints 4) Not enough users know what's happenning in the developer series. 5) Not enough non-technical people are working on the GIMP (this is at odds with when I joined, when many of the most active GIMP people were non-technical). That's the practical level. Now, here's why I think these problems exist. 1) Too many communication interfaces, not enough communication. The GIMP has the following communication methods available to it: - Website - www.gimp.org - Website - mmmaybe.gimp.org - Website - gug.sunsite.dk - IRC - irc.gnome.org - Usenet - comp.graphics.apps.gimp - Mailing list - gimp-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - Mailing list - gimp-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - Mailing list - gimp-web@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - Mailing list - gimpwin-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - Mailing list - gimpwin-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - Mail alias - bugs@xxxxxxxx - Bugzilla - bugzilla.gnome.org - CVS - cvs.gnome.org - Release notes. There's definite consolidation to be done there. That's 13 ways to get information. And 13 ways to send it. I listen personally to about 3 of those... bugs@xxx, Usenet and the devel list. Certainly when I put stuff in the list, there are several things which aren't intended as information conduits per se - CVS is for versioning source files, but the best way to find out what's happenning with the gimp these days is to read the Changelog. My first proposal would be to do a reverse split of the users and developers mailing lists - get everyone talking to one another. It will certainly annoy people because of increased traffic, but I think it'll be worth it. We have to face up to the fact that after 3 years without a major release, and only 14 active developers, the GIMP is a small project. Step 1 is to get people talking to each other. Proposal 2 is to either do away with bugs@xxxxxxxx or de-spam it. I'd actually prefer doing away with it altogether. People (including myself) use it as a crutch to avoid hunting around in bugzilla, and it results in us using bugzilla wrong (no-one takes possesion of gimp bugs, they float around in ownerless land until they get fixed). I would prefer to set up a system of module owners, who take possession of bugs, and send them on to the people best suited to fixing them. These people wouldn't even need to be technical, they'd just be required to do a first-level filter (invalid or nogabug or needinfo bugs) and send the real bugs to the people most likely to fix them. Proposal 3 is to try to persuade the Win32 guys to come back to the main gimp mailing list. 1.3 should be buildable out of CVS, but I have not been able to find anyone who's actually done it using free build tools. Personally I failed miserably somewhere around pango. Our biggest user base is win32 users, so that's probably our biggest source for future developpers, documenters, ui designers. We should be listening to them, and they should be listening to us. Proposal 4 is to set up a proper partnership between the gug and www.gimp.org. The gug is the best gimp resource on the web, which is what gimp.org should be. I know that carol's done a huge amount of work on the new site, and she's found it difficult to get content for it from people. I know as well that Raphael's spent a lot of time on the old site, and that the web team's been shrinking on him for years. The GUG site is a huge resource of content that we should be tapping into. What form that partnership would take, and how to go about getting them involved, I don't know. Sorry - this is mainly questions, not answers :) Proposal 5 is related to proposal 2. We need a structure. A neck to grab. I would like to propose setting up a sub-group of module owners. Mostly this would be people who have the definitive word on what goes into a module. This group of people would be intimate with the code, and be able to evaluate patches. There would also be a module owner for the website, and a module owner for UI (that is, interface issues). In the case of arguments on the (one) mailing list, the module owner trumps. So a sense of politics would be useful :) This group would be responsible for module administration in bugzilla (assigning ownership of the module to a minion) and would be the steering committee for the project as a whole, as well as being the arbiters of CVS permissions. Proposal 6 - allow people to submit bug reports without a bugzilla account. I would like it if Bugzilla could get their email address from the first mail they send to the portal, sign them up and send them a password, but it doesn't. As a technical problem, is this possible? Or could we have a mail alias to which mails (which pass a spam filter) get converted into bugzilla reports, with the e-mail information in the body of the bug report? I think this is important to allow people see a more reactive gimp community. A current typical use-case might be "gimp crashes, restart gimp", or it might be "gimp crashes, go to gimp web page, nothing about bugs on the first page, restart gimp", or it might be "gimp crashes, go to gimp web page, nothing about bugs on first page, scroll down 4 pages, follow "Submit a bug!" link, there's a page asking for me to enter my e-mail address, restart gimp". I don't believe that the typical gimp user gets a bugzilla account when he runs into a gimp problem. OK - so that's it. Food for thought. Basically, since 1.2 the size of the gimp community has been shrinking. We don't have any documenters, we don't have many testers, we don't have many bug fixers, we have very few web developers, we have a couple of artists, and we have maybe a dozen active developers. Something needs to be done to change that, or the gimp will never see a major release with gegl (whatever version number it will have). Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary, Lyon, France E-Mail: bolsh@xxxxxxxx