Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 14:25:23 +0100
From: Dave Neary <dneary@xxxxxxx>
Hi,
Robert L Krawitz wrote:
> I'm the Gimp-Print project lead, that's why I asked the question :-)
I know :) Sorry to hear the 5.0 release is still a bit away.
> In the 5.0 tree, the plugin has been split into two pieces, a UI
> library (libgimpprintui) and the GIMP plugin proper (which is tiny,
> and contains all of the GIMP-specific code). We should work out the
> appropriate ownership of of these two components, and the correct
> dividing line.
It would be really great if you would continue to maintain the
gimp-print plug-in that's in GIMP CVS. Understandably, since
gimp-print is now very much its own project, our release schedules
aren't going to match up for the most part, but currently the goal
would be to support the latest stable release of gimp-print in the
GIMP.
Having 2 GIMP plug-ins (1 in gimp-print that's based on the last
stable GIMP and another in the GIMP that's based on the last stable
gimp-print) doesn't really make sense. I would propose that the
gimp-print plug-in gets updated in the GIMP tree when the libgimp
API changes, and then gets updated to use the new gimpprint when a
stable release comes out.
The current plugin (based on 4.2) is basically in sustaining at this
point, and really approaching EOL. We're hardly even fixing bugs in
4.2 any more. We're probably going to do one more 4.2 release for a
few bugs, an OS X problem that isn't a Gimp-Print problem but which
gets blamed on it, and a couple of new Epson printers. But that won't
cause you any problems. I'm not going to remove it from our source
base, since there will be very few 4.2 releases left.
The plugin in our 5.0 tree is another matter. Since the 5.0 API isn't
locked down, it's premature (IMHO) to transfer it to the GIMP. There
are major structural changes from the 4.2 plugin; in particular, it
has been split into two pieces, libgimpprint and the Print plugin
proper.
libgimpprint is a GTK+ (1.2 right now) UI, without any linkage to
libgimp. The GIMP-specific code is in the plugin, consisting of 4
files of less than 1000 lines of code:
457 1492 11003 print-image-gimp.c
425 1418 13702 print.c
55 222 1590 print_gimp.h
38 199 1372 print-intl.h
975 3331 27667 total
The question is what should be transferred to the GIMP when our API
stabilizes. Certainly the core GIMP plugin is a good candidate, but
libgimpprintui is less clear. It's actually much larger than the
plugin proper (and badly in need of cleanup). It could at least in
principle be used as a print facility by other GTK-based
applications, although it's not completely general (it only handles
single pages).
4438 12230 136157 panel.c
1371 3945 36094 plist.c
155 465 3964 print-image-thumbnail.c
44 215 1385 printrc.h
105 382 3287 printrcl.l
285 654 6321 printrcy.y
869 2482 25134 ui-utils.c
7267 20373 212342 total
(I'd ideally like to support both a 4.2 and a 5.0 plugin concurrently,
because people who have built workflows around 4.2 may not want to
switch in one shot.)
--
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
