Robin Rowe wrote:

Although none of our developers are hackers, nice to hear you think highly of some of us.

hmm, you don't have a single programmer who is working on FilmGimp because he enjoys it? if you do, you probably have a hacker on your team. Hacker in the original MIT definition, not the media corroupted version.

What bothered you and other GIMP developers so much about Film Gimp that in 2000 you unexpectedly discarded three man-years of your own work funded at substantial expense by the motion picture industry?

Noone who was making leadership decisions around then liked the gimp-1.0 codebase. I cannot answer more specificly than to tell you the best explanation I have recieved is that the old maintainers of Film Gimp understoond, "this is not how we want to do things," with "you suck, go away." Some feelings got hurt. Some people left, and there was a lot of unncecssary bad blood that could have been cured with a little more diplomacy.

In 1998 Film Gimp was an official development branch of GIMP CVS, much like GEGL is today.

not exactly. Gegl is a seperate project and gegl will never contain gui code. It will only be the image processing engine for the existing Gimp codebase.

There's no discussion in the GIMP mailing list archives regarding the reasons
leading up to that big decision in 2000, in fact, very little public discussion
of any kind regarding Film Gimp that I can find. Why is that?

Likely because it just fell of the map. This isn't necessarlly because someone wrote "here there be dragons" over it. There could have been poor communication and some hurt feelings. That would have been enough to drive away a maintainer or two.

Regardless of what went on in the past, the question comes often enough for me to conclude that nearly every major gimp developer would like to see some kind of merge from the CinePaint people. As far as I can tell though, you simply have no interest in working with us, so I don't forsee this happening.

And please don't misunderstand. These people don't think what you are doing to be "wrong" or "bad." Quite the opposite. Any interest generated in the movie industry for open source can only help all of us. Most of us just hate to see a large duplication of effort. Perhaps more significantly, there are several of us still around that remember with not so fond memories, what it was like to work on the gimp-1.0 code base. I know from personal conversation that almost all complaints mentioned on this list about Film Gimp are meant in this context.

I for one, and more than a few others, would really like to see CinePaint and Gimp working together again. I am not even neccsarially suggesting a complete merge. Sven and Mitch have done a really good job refactoring the gui stuff into objects. So good, in fact, (please correct me if I am wrong) that I am willing to bet that CinePaint and the Gimp could share a very significant chunk of the internal gui api's, without interfering with each other. (we could even factor this stuff into an external project, Extended GTK, if you will).

And I happen to remember you mentioning that you don't think what we are doing with the compositing engine is the best way to go. However, porting the internal gui stuff to whatever compositing engine you are using now will only help us, since we need to do the same thing when gegl comes around anyway.

Every time Cinepaint gets mentioned the divide between the CinePaint crew and the Gimp crew gets worse. This needs to change or people must give up on the idea of a merge. This change will only happen when people stop trying to figure out who to blame for the split and start trying to encourge a merge.

Robin, do you want to see more overlap between the Gimp and Cinepaint projects? 'Cause if you don't, someone who wants to see the merge happen needs to volunteer for the job, otherwise this goes nowhere.

-- Daniel Rogers