Regarding the process of developing a roadmap, I think this mailing list should be where proposals are made and commented upon (there has already been some nice commentary in this thread). The "main" GIMP developers should fairly rapidly be able to come to a decision about the roadmap (through discussions on #gimp) and announce the main focal points of the plan. While it is difficult to dictate the direction of volunteers, with a quick release cycle focusing on the development needs of GIMP, programmers might be willing to set aside their own projects temporarily in order to make GIMP more conducive to further developerment. If I may be so bold, what follows is my own proposal for the 2.6 roadmap: I think that substituting GEGL into the GIMP core should be the main focus. This should be done in a manner such that the user is not confronted with the directed graph nature of GEGL -- i.e., the user interface limits GEGL nodes to just three drawable inputs: the active layer, the projection of "lower" layers, and the layermask (if present). The only significant change from a user standpoint should be the addition of "layer groups". From a rendering standpoint, layer groups dictate a certain degree of low-level functionality that would best be addressed during incorporation of GEGL into the core (particularly, "nesting" of composited projections). From a user interface standpoint, "layer groups" would entail significant changes to the tree view of the layerstack; as well as changes in behavior of certain operations such as raising/lowering, linking/hiding, duplicating/deleting, and drag-n-drop of layers. Implementing this would be a fairly extensive undertaking (probably requiring more developer resources), but would best be handled at the same time as the GEGL incorporation to avoid future conflicts in implementing the appropriate model-view-controller paradigm. Finally, there should be an effort to maintain integrity of the XCF file format by converting between the core implementation of layer groups and parasites attached to drawables during saves and loads of XCF files (older GIMP versions would read the files but lose the layer grouping information). Providing "layer groups" would be an evident improvement to GIMP while incorporating GEGL is necessary for furthering development efforts. Issues such as CMYK, layer effects, deeper bit-depth color, and improved text handling would be better addressed once GEGL is embedded into GIMP. Usability enhancements might be pursued, but should not be permitted to prolong the release cycle. Though I have as yet contributed very little to GIMP development (and nothing towards that of GEGL), I have spent a good deal of time trying to gain an overall understanding and hope to become more helpful in the future. --------------------------------------------------- Quoting Sven Neumann <sven@xxxxxxxx>: > Hi, > > so far we didn't have a well-defined development roadmap. I would like > to propose that this is changed for GIMP 2.6 and beyond. Hopefully this > can help to acomplish two goals: > > - GIMP 2.6 should not take too long to develop > - we will get more developers > > Before we start the discussion of the roadmap, perhaps we should talk > about how we should go about getting to a roadmap. Should we do it on > this list, do we want to use a Wiki, Bugzilla or anything like that? > > IMO it would be best if people proposed features here so that they can > be discussed on the list. We should then collect these proposals > somewhere and try to decide on milestones for them later. It would > probably help if we try to be strict bout only proposing a single > feature per mail. > > What do you think? _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
