On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Pete Bergstrom <petebergstrom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Eric Grivel <gimp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I am getting the impression that the Gimp project is trapped in a >> chicken-and-egg problem with regard to attracting new contributors, >> where the few core developers are too busy maintaining the product to >> spend a lot of time helping new developers come on board. >> >> Gimp is an extremely large and complex system. I am a fairly experienced >> coder myself, and have recently submitted patches for two open bugs. But >>... >> At this point, knowing how busy the core Gimp developers are, and >> recognizing that it will take more time for them to walk me through a >> problem and a solution than it would take them to just fix the issue >> themselves, I am hesitant to ask for a lot of help. On the other hand, >> the idea of just delving in and figuring it out myself is quite daunting. >> >> Which is where my thought of a "boot camp" came in. What if there was a >> group of potential new developers all struggling with the same learning >>... >> This would require some serious commitment of time by one or more of the >> Gimp developers, and would mean other work wouldn't get done. The >> potential payoff however in the form of bringing one or more additional >> Gimp developers up to speed could be significant. > > I find myself in the same situation. I popped up in late December with > an interest in getting GEGL more fully integrated into GIMP (I'd like > to see 8+ bpc support), and Øyvind gave me some pointers and partial > code for what he wants to happen next (so I'm one of the time sinks he > referred to a couple of days ago). I'm still working to figure out the > seemingly recursive concepts. Feel free to drop by the #gimp and #gegl IRC channels to ask directed smart questions for understanding the code. Also be aware that some of the existing core contributors both dislike email in the first place, and are "cursed by knowledge" thus not the best people to write introductions to how things work; new-comers are in a better situation to do this. For the last few years GIMP (and GEGL) have been involved in Google Summer of Code which can be considered some form of such a boot camp - some of the students have also stuck around after their last money from google arrived, the common practice in the last years has also been that the domain experts have not neccesarily been direct mentors for students but "meta-mentors", giving guidance on irc in the public channels for any problems that might crop up. /Øyvind Kolås -- «The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed» -- William Gibson http://pippin.gimp.org/ ; http://ffii.org/ _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
