Hi,
Sven Neumann wrote:
So IMO the things we need to consider are: - how can we make gimp development more transparent? - how can we publish short and long term plans and roadmaps? - why is there no maintained user FAQ? - why is the mailing-list archive not working?
Good questions...
- A list of active developers would help, along with their domains of expertise. The GIMP's been around for nearly 10 years now, and the full list of contributors doesn't really emphasise who's doing the main body of the work.
- The roadmaps (when they change) should be announced on the list, stored on developer.gimp.org and linked to from www.gimp.org somehow.
The roadmaps, IMHO, should be time based rather than feature based (as we have discussed in the past), and should aim for roughly 3 timescales
1) near-term: next 6 months
2) medium term: Next 12 to 18 months
3) Long term: major goals not covered in 1 or 2, with how to get there (a brief list of prerequisites).
In our context, that would mean
1) Plans for 2.2
2) Plans after 2.2 (notably, gegl integration, and whether that's realistic for 3.0, and to what level)
3) Other stuff.
I think we should also have "projects" which can proceed independently of these - things like the usability tests can have their own schedule, with perhaps a developer who agrees to blindly put in place agreed reccommendations.
Also, we need to define a kind of general set of guiding principles - are we going for a minimalist GIMP with lots of stuff addable, but very little installed, or for a kind of all-encompassing GIMP? How are we going to finally handle the plug-in distribution problem? In the meantime, how do we handle requests for plug-ins to be added to the main distribution? Currently there is no way to handle them, which meansthat we get no requests, more or less. There are some really good plug-ins which could be added, I think.
- I really have no idea why there is no maintained user FAQ. It seems like there is very much an idea that the users and developers are two distinct, disjoint groups. Perhaps we should be asking user groups to maintain a FAQ, and encouraging them to contact us if they have any problems.
This kind of comes around to an older issue too. Years ago the GUG contacted someone (I don't know who) about having a user group space on www.gimp.org, and apparrently they came away from that with a bad taste in their mouth. Perhaps the time has come to try and re-build that bridge and see what we can give each other?
- As to the mailing list archives, I guess yosh will have to answer that one.
Cheers, Dave.
-- Dave Neary bolsh@xxxxxxxx
