From: Sven Neumann <sven@xxxxxxxx> Date: 26 Dec 2003 18:59:57 +0100 I don't use Mac OS X myself but I regulary get the chance to watch people using it and to talk to them. Lately I even got involved in writing software for it. My impression is that in order to make GIMP a success on Mac OS X, it isn't that important to have a GTK+ port that runs natively on Quartz. Mac OS X nowadays ships with a decent X server that integrates quite nicely into the Aqua desktop (there are some issues here but they could be solved). If you install Xcore (the Mac OS X development environment) you get Darwin ports which closely resembles the well known BSD ports system. With this setup it is amazingly easy to get GIMP up and running. All you do is to enter "ports install gimp" and leave your Mac alone for some time while it compiles and installs all the necessary software. This gives you gimp-1.2.5. GIMP-1.3 isn't included in the ports system yet but I expect this to happen soon after we do the 2.0 release. Perhaps we can even speed this up if someone contributes a ports file for 1.3. The prerequisites are certainly there already. "ports install gtk2" works flawlessly and provides you with GTK+ version 2.2.3 and recent versions of all the software it depends on. One comment I've seen reading through various OS X forums about Gimp-Print is that the packaging is important. An experienced Mac person built an OS X package for us that runs a traditional OS X installer, and people appreciate not being forced to use the command line. Even having to type "ports install gimp" -- or more likely "sudo ports install gimp" -- will turn off the hardened Macintosh user community. These folks are even more command-line averse than Windows users. If you want acceptance on OS X, I *strongly* suggest doing a proper disk image package (a .dmg file is a filesystem image) that installs everything required (gtk, gdk, glib, all the plugins, and then does all of the necessary configuration). I also recommend building a binary package; compiling requires installation of the developer tools (400 MB download) and is quite slow. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@xxxxxxxxxxxx Project lead for Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton
