I've been asked to update my GIMP Effects book (and I'm finally getting around to doing it). Before I get too far along I'd like to make the screenshots match (as close as possible) the version that will be most widely in use at the time of release. My guess for how long it will take me to update the book is about 4-6 months, but I tend to be optimistic. Life always gets in the way. Who knows, maybe it'll just flow outta me this time.

I know Sven and the developers hate this question but: is there any schedule for when the next release might come out? Even a rough target range? Is 2.8 stable enough with respect to the UI in git to work from there (I haven't built out of SVN in about a month or two and haven't really investigated stability in much longer than that)?

The one thing that's most important in this case is just making sure I'm inline with the expected menu layouts when updating the tutorials. I didn't see any big UI changes on the UI Redesign Blog or UI Redesign Wiki, so menus will probably be the most likely thing to change (or so I'm guessing). Note that I'm not worried about new features that might come along since the book tries to point out how to use basic tools (re: likely common with GIMP back to 2.2 or 2.0) for specific tasks.

If there is simply no way of knowing, I understand. I'll just work with 2.6 as the baseline. I did that the first time, thinking 2.4 was a long way out, and it came out not long after my book (which was on 2.2). I'm trying to avoid that if possible.

Thanks.