Hi all,
After the time-based roadmap that I set yesterday, and the
reaction to it, both Sven and brix said that they would have
preferred more content.
Well, here goes... Note, I believe that a time-based release is
the way to go. That means I think it's better to say that we will
have a release in the Summer than to say that (say) plug-ins will
all have presets.
That said, here's what I think is a reasonable target feature set
for 2.2:
1) Migration to GTK+ 2.4, including
- File selector upgrade (allows things like bookmarks)
- remove all GtkOptionMenus
- use GtkActions for shortcuts
2) Cut & Paste across other applications including at least
- image/pnm (raw, uncompressed data)
- image/png (compressed data, slower copies)
- image/svg+xml (sodipodi, OO Draw and InkScape would be cool)
3) Edit patterns in-place
4) Save as GIMP Pattern saves direct to ~/.gimp-1.3/patterns
(same for "Save as GIMP brush)
5) Preview widget to replace GimpOldPreview
6) User-defined presets for most plug-ins
7) Move from SIOD to guile for script-fu
8) Complete help
On the list of "maybe" stuff, there's:
9) A decent image browser/thumbnail viewer + cover-sheet support
10) Macro recorder, if anyone has ideas on how it can be done
with the current PDB/undo system
Things I'd like to see someone try:
11) Layer groups, if there's an easy way to do them with the
current code (I know these are easy with gegl, but gegl's
over a year away, more than likely)
12) A few types of operations on an effects layer (idem - this
can be done in a hackish way for a limited number of common
operations pretty easily, I think, and that will be enough
for most people's needs)
This is a start of a feature list, and some stuff on this list will
not get done, and some stuff not on the list will get done. There
are a number of good patches waiting in Bugzilla to be applied as
soon as we branch, which will give us a nice start for the first
unstable release.
On the policy side, here's how I would like things to be handled
in 2.1.x:
- Every feature added to CVS has a bug # associated with it
- Every feature on the feature list is cut up into a number of
independant bits (for example) migrating to gtk+ 2.4 is really
3 or 4 different jobs, not all of these need to be done by the
same person)
- Features should be prioritised, and the priorities more or
less respected.
What I mean by this last one is that for me, the only 2 features
in here which I consider very important for 2.4 are
inter-application copy & paste and GTK+ 2.4 migration. The rest
is more or less candy. I would hope that if people have some
spare time that they'd choose to work on things which are
considered more important, rather than work on other stuff.
So there you have it, my ambitious view of what might get done in
6 weeks. But I think that we should be hard on ourselves... if
features are not finished by the time we get to feature-freeze,
we should not be afraid to back out some unfinished stuff, attach
the patch that was backed out to the bug associated with the
feature, and set the milestone for 2.4/3.0. Of course, we should
do this nicely after asking the person whether they think they'll
get the thing finished in the next couple of weeks. We're not
going to get our knickers in a twist over a couple of features
that slip past a date by a couple of weeks.
Cheers,
Dave.
--
David Neary,
Lyon, France
E-Mail: bolsh@xxxxxxxx
