David Neary schrieb:
> I'm not opposed to having stuff split off, but I am worried about
the stuff getting a bit lost. Most gimp 2.0 installs (the vast majority, I would say) don't have GAP or the perl bindings installed. That's not a trend we should be encouraging, IMHO. In fact, I think we need to work out ways to actively discourage it, and make sure most people have those packages (and others) installed. I'm just not sure how to do that (as I said before).
There's one aspect to splitting things out that hasn't been discussed yet. By splitting e.g. a plug-in out into it's own module and basing it on gimp-plug-in template, it becomes incredibly easy to compile it for any platform without going though the hassle of having to compile GIMP itself. This would be especially interesting for those plug-ins that have dependencies not already covered by GIMP or GTK+ itself, e.g. AA or XPM.
Additionally, this would send an important signal to plug-in developers. Currently, some of them think that being included in the core gimp module is the ultimate goal of their plug-in. Some even develop their plug-in in the GIMP source tree, which makes it uneccessary difficult to build for other people. By providing examples for standalone plug-ins that can be updated independently of GIMP releases and provided as binaries for an arbitrary platform in no time, this could be changed.
For the distribution of the plug-ins, it might become neccessary to improve the registry. Adding things to it without being the author of a particular plug-in would be interesting for providers of binaries, for example (provided that any bad stuff is kept out). Installers that can get plug-ins directly from the registry might be interesting, too.
Just my 2 cents, Michael
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