GIMP team decides on features plan for 2.8 and beyond

[mikethedj4]

Source - Libre Graphics World

Last night GIMP's team had a first official online meeting and came up with a plan for the nearest future and a prioritized list of features for v2.8 and beyond.

Speaking of nearest plans the team finds it most urgent to bring back wiki.gimp.org to life which will probably be current Alexia's unofficial wiki that contains information for newly joined developers.

Likewise urgent are releasing of the next unstable version and deciding what projects could be done for Google Summer of Code 2011 and who could be mentoring. Needless to say, if you want to participate, please join gimp-developer@ mailing list and introduce yourself.

Speaking of priorities, releasing v2.8 is still the highest one, with optional single-window mode still to finish as well as layers groups to get a cleanup (masks for layer groups, per-layer clips possible too).

After releasing 2.8 the team will focus on making 3.0 a short-cycle release based on GTK+3 and featuring high bit depth editing. Since a lot of GIMP has already been ported to GTK+3 by Michael Natterer, the team is likely to focus on further integration of GEGL by the time 2.8 is out.

Faster release of v3.0 is also desirable because GTK+2 is horribly broken with regards to graphic tablets and isn't likely to be fixed, which, sadly, means that many excellent improvements in the brush engine won't be of much use for Windows based users of GIMP 2.8.

According to current plans v3.2 is likely to introduce long overdue non-destructive editing. Some other important features like recording and playback of scripts, JavaScript support and native CMYK support are also on the radar. However they have prerequisites like complete GEGL integration are thus are currently lowest in the list of priorities and not yet assigned to any of the planned versions.

It's important to note that there are no calendar-like plans for neither 2.8, nor 3.0 or 3.2 whatsoever. The only way to make them be released faster is to join the team and take some responsibilities.

[Willy]

I read online that they are not gonna make it so you have to have multiple windows open in this new GIMP... Can you confirm anything =D

and How exactly would I get the new unstable version? And how Unstable would this be... like just GIMP would crash or whole computer?

[ofnuts]

"Unstable" means that some things don't work. I do use the unstable version from time to time and it never crashed on me. Modern operating systems (XP and later, Linux...) are also quite resilient to application misbehavior.

"Unstable" also means that they may work some day and be broken in the next update. If you run Linux it's fairly easy to get the latest code and build it. If you are on Windows it is a lot more difficult (but some dedicated people do...).

[Willy]

So there is not a way where I can just get the unstable version as a tester? That would be cool =D

I have Vista

[ofnuts]

The problem is that the 2.7 version evolves pretty fast, and you don't get pre-built Windows installers very often, so by the time you report a bug it may have been fixed. I think that for the time being the 2.7 builds for Windows are more produced to let people see how they like the new things than for real testing (unless you report things in the week following a new Windows build).