hello, long ago when i had a job and a home and friends who were gimp developers i had an idea of a plug-in building environment. in the time that this environment was designed, i lost all of those things previously listed. the environment i helped to design is now being used successfully at oracle saving them $150K a year and doing absolutely nothing for gimp except tossing it a few crumbs every so often. this thing is called sourcebo. i am still waiting for beta.gimp.org. i was (perhaps teminally) dismayed to find out very recently that there will be no beta. i had to ask outright. all my plans were on hold for that. all my plans are gone now. not gone, just being used successfully at oracle and not with my project. if me and yosh were an experiment in a paid hacker working with an unpaid hacker, it has really really failed. i am doing everything i can with what i have left to end the few shreads of what is left from this venture. my experience with gimp is different than dave neary is talking about. he is saying that if you dont get everything at one time, you will not get it. when i first started to use gimp, it was so much fun to go online and "shop" (for lack of a better term) for new and fun things for gimp that were on several different web sites -- each with its own personality. much more the pleasure when i got to meet those web site owners later online and even more in real life this year. my biggest complaint was that many times, after long and enjoyable "shopping trips" coming back to /usr/home and installing the stuff i found -- only to find gimp already had it. and the trend tried to continue when i had the older web site full of things for gimp-1.2. yosh wanted to include my palettes in the tarball. i was sort of upset because this was exactly what we were supposed to be not doing. i guess i could have seen the problems then. now, raphael has broken and rebuilt the web site without knowing any of this stuff. with the blessing of all i guess. gap will be more popular as people with ideas and needs for animation eh, get their ideas and full fill their needs. i never was able to figure out how to use it, having no ideas or needs for animations. gimp-perl gets installed now by debian for gimp-2.0 and i tried to install it for gimp-2.1. people who want gimp-python will go and install it. if there were a web site, like the plug-in development site i had envisioned, stripping all that stuff from the gimp core should be no problem and just increase the popularity of gimp. too bad it is all working at oracle now and not for me and my project. carol
