Creating a new thread as this has nothing to do with my Summer of Code project...

It would be nice, if you can document the steps to compile Gimp for MacOS in the Wiki:
http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Users:Beginner_Developer%27s_FAQ

I can try, but it was such a mess... I'm not sure I can remember all the steps I did, let alone if I'm able to document them ;) A lot of dependencies needed to be built and installed separately from the gtk-osx versions (and I'm not only talking about the usual suspects babl and gegl), then paths and makefiles had to be hacked for everything to point to the right place...

That would be cool. Perhaps you can work together with Simone from "Gimp for OS X".

On his website he is writing something about a bug in gnome regarding tablets which prevents him from releasing 2.7.2 and probably 2.8. I'm afraid I can't do much about it because I don't have a tablet and the time to fix bugs right now. Maybe after Summer of Code. I was just thinking about releasing binaries with the current limitations (apparently tablets not usable, no twain, no dbus) for those people who want to use it anyways.

Im wondering if that menu patch could be formated into a build switched thing that could be integrated. Being consistent with mac paradigm sounds pretty important to me personally...

It's not my patch (I just modified it a little bit), but I think every modification is guarded by GDK_WINDOWING_QUARTZ and __x86_64__ so there should be no problem. Can't test 32-bit though, but I'm not sure which osx versions this affects. Also it uses some deprecated stuff in gtkosxapplication.h so it needs some modifications there, will look into that.
The other thing is that we need to link against an additional library, but I don't have any experience with modifying autotools build systems. What is to be modified to do that properly?