Hi, yesterday someone from the GIMP developers stumpled across this page: http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/dev/brushes.html After examing the brushes that can be downloaded there, we found that GIMP can not read them although they have the .gbr extension and the magic file header for GIMP brushes. Actually it's even the very same format but version 3. But, version 3 of the GIMP brush format does not exist. What happened here? I don't know exactly when this change to the brush format was made nor who made it. I just want to state that this is an inacceptible procedure. If FilmGIMP or CinePaint needs a new brush format for whatever reasons, they are of course free to design the new format closely to the GIMP brush format. But it can not be that you simply take the GIMP brush format and increase the version number. This is something that only the GIMP developers can decide to do. If for some reason you wanted to stick with the GIMP brush format, you should have at least asked. We could then have decided on a format change and include support for the new file format version in both applications. >From reading your web-page I understood that CinePaint does not even support the GBR versions 1 and 2 that are used by The GIMP. This seems to indicate that you just needed a new and different format. You should have at least changed the magic file header then so that utilities such as file(1) are able to differentiate between GIMP brushes and CinePaint brushes. There is not much we can do to change this situation now that it has happened. I am not going to yell at anyone since I don't even know how far this change dates back. But I want you to know that we are upset about what happened and I ask you to assure that similar things don't happen in the future. File formats are crucial and we can not accept any incompatibilities caused by third-party developers changing our file formats. Well, there is one thing we can do: If someone would provide us with the details about the version 3 brush format, we might decide to include support for it in The GIMP. This would at least reduce confusion among our users. Sven
