Hello!
My name is Dumitru Ursu (dimaursu16 on irc), and I'm a student at Technical University of Moldova, Computer Science, second year. I would like to contribute to the GIMP project, on Implementing the Combined Selection Tool. I have strong knowledge of C, and I think that with a little help and guidance I can accomplish this task. I want to contribute because I want to improve my skills, and because I use GIMP very often and I want to help on its improving so others can make a better use of this program.

About the Project: I think that the user should be able to use an intuitive tool, with much of the work on settings being done auto-magically, just some options for tuning, in the selection tool properties. Most of the code from Select by color, Lasso, and Intelligent scissors should be reused, as
- painting *dragging* should behave mostly like Foreground Select tool - selecting with clicks on a contrast path == intelligent scissors

At some point in the research made by Voralberg students in 2010, the second team ( http://mmiworks.net/pics/blog10/10team2.pdf, page 14 ) mentioned that 3 types of brushes will be available( for geometric selections) . I think it would be reasonable to use all the brushes available in Paintbrush in GIMP, for avoiding designing new brushes, (which means more coding). So there will be needed just to adjust the brush to work as a selection tool, mostly like the Quick Mask works.
I believe that selection tools can be condensed into one, but that can make it trickier for the user (one could not find how to make a rectangular selection, for example ), so the tools could be either:

1. one tool which does the foreground select when moving with the mouse button pressed and behaves like Intelligent scissor when clicking 2. another for geometric selection ( squares, circles, stars, polygons)
or:
one single tool just like 1. but in addition can use brushes ( and they can have square, round or star form )

(this is a raw sketch, but I just wanted to see whether I'm getting it right)

( I already have a development environment ( a linux box ), and I've built "babl", "gegl", and "gimp" from git, so please don't ask me if I've done that)