Hi,

As some of you may have noticed, I committed a couple of changes recently to libgimpwidgets concerning the gui for setting random numbers. This was essentially backwards-compatibility for the PDB calls for several random functions so that we could request a random generated thing from a number of plug-ins without having to generate a random seed in the plug-in itself.

Of course, we could have left libgimpwidgets the way it was if that was all there was to it, and simply have the plug-ins call g_random_int() to get a seed before calling gimp_random_seed_new(). The addition of an extra argument to gimp_random_seed_new() was to allow a way for the user to say "I don't care about the preview or whatever, just give me a random thing". The advantage of this is, for example, that you could generate 10 plasmas all different just using Alt-F to call the plasma plug-in with the last values.

The thing is, I'm not particularly happy with the idea. The whole point of changing this widget was to have "run with last values" generate the same result as the last time. Plus, coming up with an appropriate UI to expose this isn't that easy - I'm personally not sure this should happen, I think that the compat code that I added last week is OK, but that the current UI should stay as it is.

In any case, I have made most of the change requested by mitch. What's left would be to add a boolean for the criteria to the 4 or 5 plug-ins which use the random seed, and to make toggling the checkbox on generate a new seed. It's not done, and won't be done until at earliest tomorrow. There are screenshots of what the widget looks like here attached to the bug report about this (which I've re-opened), bug #129529 - http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129529

Please attach comments there, or reply here (perhaps the mailing list is better).

I think I've almost convinced mitch that this is not the right thing to do :)

Cheers,
Dave.