Hi, David Neary <bolsh@xxxxxxxx> writes: > On another note, I'm not sure this is a desirable goal. splitting > stuff off feels an awful lot like putting it out to pasture. The > goal of just having the core application, with no plug-ins, no > image data structures, no scripts, and a minimum number of brushes, > patterns and gradients doesn't seem to be the direction that > people want to see the GIMP taking, from what I can tell. It is however the road that the developers want GIMP to be taking. The idea is that a number of smaller packages make the code easier to work with and easier to maintain. This will allow more people to work on it. The workload is shared and more people are taking responsibily for their part of the GIMP. No one talks about shipping the core application, with no plug-ins, no image data structures, no scripts, and a minimum number of brushes, patterns and gradients to our users. What we are talking about here is what you get when you do a cvs checkout of the core gimp module. > People would like more brushes, more patterns, more gradients, with > the ability to delete the ones they don't use/like, and more > scripts/plug-ins with a way to organise the menus according to the > ones they use most often. I think the experience with GIMP development very clearly shows that we are not able to fulfill this wish if we stick to the way that GIMP is organized now. There have been almost no changes to brushes, patterns, gradients etc. in the GIMP source tree for years. I am certain that this would change as soon as we move these out of the source tree and let someone else handle packaging of these files. > I know that you believe that we should work on the core > application and a few plug-ins, and leave most of the plug-in > development to 3rd party plug-in maintainers, I'm not sure I > agree. I think that we should be almost promiscuous in what we > accept into CVS, but equally vicious in removing things from CVS > when they become unmaintaned. I think that most people don't want > to have to install several packages, they want to install the > GIMP, and automatically get plug-ins like gap, refocus, and even > DBP. Exactly. But that doesn't say anything about the way we organize that stuff in CVS. People who are installing GNOME also expect to get a set of applications and actually that is what they get when installing GNOME. Yet still all these different GNOME applications are spread over hundreds of CVS modules. Essentially, what the user gets when installing GIMP is a question of packaging GIMP not a question of throwing it all into a single CVS tree and release a gigantic tarball of this mess every so often (this is more or less what we are doing right now). David, I am not following you on your road. Your argumentation is severily flawed and what you are asking for is not going to happen with me as the GIMP maintainer. It's way too much work already and the only way to reduce the workload for whoever maintains the GIMP sources is to split as much stuff out as possible. > I don't really have ideas how to achieve that goal, but I'm a little > worried about the desire to remove lots of stuff from the main GIMP > CVS - this will be seen by the greater public as removing features > from the GIMP. I don't really care how some morons will perceive the removal of stuff from the GIMP source tree. This is basically a question of explaining and documenting this action. It could very well be seen differently. Sven
