Hi Sven,
Sven Neumann wrote:
> If we want to get rid of
> the Script-Fu dependency in the long run, then we need to make it
> optional at some point. Now seems to be a good time to do that. It
> would allow people who want to switch to Tiny-Fu to install GIMP w/o
> Script-Fu while the vast majority of GIMP users would continue to use
> Script-Fu for now.
There is another alternative, which is to install both (this
would perhaps confuse things...) Kevin has mentioned that script-fu
and tiny-fu live quite happily together in the past.
> David Neary <dneary@xxxxxxx> writes:
> > On a side point (which is relevant), there are many users on
> > Usenet who have been downloading the GIMP and building it from
> > sources, who have been asking why so many plug-ins were removed
> > from the GIMP between 1.2 and 2.0 - the plug-ins that have been
> > "removed" are perl-fu plug-ins which were transparently included
> > in 1.2.x if you were building the main GIMP source tree and had
> > perl installed, and that's no longer the case.
>
> That's a documentation issue. I am not going to allow the source tree
> to be clobbered with more stuff simply because we are too lazy to add
> some simple notes to our web-site and FTP server. In the long run we
> will want to split GIMP into even more packages.
It's not just a documentation issue. The fact that perl-fu has
been moved out of the source tree is pretty well documented.
However, the actual knock-on effects of that aren't particularly
widely known. The fact that something is documented doesn't mean
that people are going to know about it.
What is needed is a list of plug-ins which are available only in
perl-fu, and to somehow transfer this list to everyone
downloading the GIMP sources and building from scratch, as well
as packagers. We can put a file beside the traballs, listing the
plug-ins that have been moved to perl-fu, but I don't think many
people would read it. "They deserve what they get, then" you
might say. Perhaps...
I don't know of a good way to communicate that to people who
should know, except on a case-by-case basis (when someone asks
what happened to filter X). I think that at least we should
include links to releases of gimp-perl, gimp-help and gimp-gap in
the directory where the GIMP sources are shipped. That would
help, I think. And gimp-perl could have a description "Extra GIMP
plug-ins" rather than "perl bindings for the GIMP" or whatever.
I don't know - I'm just throwing out ideas. I really don't have a
good idea how we can communicate this to people for perl
plug-ins, and I imagine that we will have even more problems if
we do the same thing with the scheme plug-ins.
How about shipping the scripts with the GIMP, and somehow
informing someone when they run a script that they need either
script-fu or tiny-fu installed? Is that technically possible?
Could we do the same thing for python-fu and perl-fu?
Cheers,
Dave.
--
David Neary,
Lyon, France
E-Mail: bolsh@xxxxxxxx
CV: http://dneary.free.fr/CV/
