I am one of these active users that have been lead to believe that gimp 2.0
will use GEGL. So, all the developers out that think 2.0 is yet another small gimp release, or something else (imho) stupid, can just go away or something.
Im actually kind of sick of listening all of you bicker back and forth. From my outsider point of view, 2.0 is set in stone, and what it will include will be set in stone. Also, from my outsider pov, stuff like gegl is a very cool idea. Anything that allows gimp to be more powerful is always a good thing. I also see gegl as a major feature, something that would produce a 2.0.
However, the more you all bicker, the less work is actually getting done. I hate to have to be the one saying this, but you should just be coding, because in the end, whoever codes gimp 2.0 is the one who gets to say what happens, or _nothing happens at all._
Gegl is basically the end all be all gimp graphics rendering engine. It will be able to do what no popular graphics manipulation program has done before. (I think.) 16-bit per channel graphics is good, and internal floating point based calculations independent of the actual image's bitdepth is good as well (due to the fact multi-layered images often go above 1.0 and below 0.0, and clipping severely damages the output.)
Also, while Im on the pro gimp 2.0 kick, I read the xcf2 threads. I agree, something like gimp2 will need a better file format. Internally, I dont care whats in it. Im not a gimp developer, Im a user, so I should have to care. _However_, it needs to be able to be very extendable. I want to be able to store all future gegl supported bitdepth and color space types with it, I want to be able to depend on it to be stable the same way the professional people depend on psd being a half way decent format, and I want it to someday exist, the same way I want gimp2 to someday exist.
A lot of users out there are depending on the gimp development team to get gimp2 done sometime in their lifetimes, and from what I see on here, this may never happen. And Im going to be severely disappointed if this happens.
Two bits from a former developer, here. We talked a lot about what 2.0 would have after we released 1.0. CVS current is nothing close to that. I'd be disappointed if it were released as 2.0. So would a lot of the people I talk to about the GIMP. A lot of people have seen the GEGL documents. People have expectations for 2.0 that this release will not meet. I personally think you shouldn't call it 2.0 until it supports Lab as a native color space, but that's because I really like Lab.
The relative lack of serious technical progress in recent versions is why I now use Photoshop 7 for most image editing, these days. I only use GIMP when I want one of the plug-in effects that isn't available from PS7, or when I'm on a computer that I don't have a PS7 license for. Maybe I'm the only one like that, but I doubt it. PS5 and Gimp 1.0 were pretty competitive in most areas, with a few well-noted shortcomings. PS7 completely blows away CVS HEAD. Releasing it as 2.0 will invite comparisons, and you don't want to do that right now.
I'm not actively involved in the project anymore, so it's not really my fish to fry, but I'd ask the current project maintainers to reconsider releasing the current HEAD branch as 1.4 instead of 2.0.
Kelly
