From: Sven Neumann
Date: 26 Dec 2003 18:59:57 +0100

I don't use Mac OS X myself but I regulary get the chance to watch people using it and to talk to them. Lately I even got involved in writing software for it. My impression is that in order to make GIMP a success on Mac OS X, it isn't that important to have a GTK+ port that runs natively on Quartz. Mac OS X nowadays ships with a decent X server that integrates quite nicely into the Aqua desktop (there are some issues here but they could be solved). If you install Xcore (the Mac OS X development environment) you get Darwin ports which closely resembles the well known BSD ports system. With this setup it is amazingly easy to get GIMP up and running. All you do is to enter "ports install gimp" and leave your Mac alone for some time while it compiles and installs all the necessary software. This gives you gimp-1.2.5. GIMP-1.3 isn't included in the ports system yet but I expect this to happen soon after we do the 2.0 release. Perhaps we can even speed this up if someone contributes a ports file for 1.3. The prerequisites are certainly there already. "ports install gtk2" works flawlessly and provides you with GTK+ version 2.2.3 and recent versions of all the software it depends on.

One comment I've seen reading through various OS X forums about Gimp-Print is that the packaging is important. An experienced Mac person built an OS X package for us that runs a traditional OS X installer, and people appreciate not being forced to use the command line. Even having to type "ports install gimp" -- or more likely "sudo ports install gimp" -- will turn off the hardened Macintosh user community. These folks are even more command-line averse than Windows users.

If you want acceptance on OS X, I *strongly* suggest doing a proper disk image package (a .dmg file is a filesystem image) that installs everything required (gtk, gdk, glib, all the plugins, and then does all of the necessary configuration). I also recommend building a binary package; compiling requires installation of the developer tools (400 MB download) and is quite slow.

On Dec 26, 2003, at 7:27 PM, Robert L Krawitz wrote:

One comment I've seen reading through various OS X forums about Gimp-Print is that the packaging is important. An experienced Mac person built an OS X package for us that runs a traditional OS X installer, and people appreciate not being forced to use the command line. Even having to type "ports install gimp" -- or more likely "sudo ports install gimp" -- will turn off the hardened Macintosh user community. These folks are even more command-line averse than Windows users.

I couldn't have agreed more with this. On advising fellow OS X users I try very very hard to find alternative solutions to having them do something from the command line. It is simply an obstacle most Mac users are willing to live without.

If you want acceptance on OS X, I *strongly* suggest doing a proper disk image package (a .dmg file is a filesystem image) that installs everything required (gtk, gdk, glib, all the plugins, and then does all of the necessary configuration). I also recommend building a binary package; compiling requires installation of the developer tools (400 MB download) and is quite slow.

..and, might I add, even an installer package is something the average OS X user prefers not to see. The application installation method that is preferred is simply "1. open the disk image, 2. Drag the application to whatever folder you want to keep it in, 3. Run" I'm not suggesting this could or should be done with the Gimp, I'm just trying to say that if general acceptance of the Gimp as a viable Photoshop alternative is the goal, rather than just an application for the recent switchers coming from unix or linux, the application needs an easy installation procedure that won't require anything other than simple short instructions.

That said, I have 1.3.23 running on my Powerbook, in OS X, and with the Industrial GTK theme and a bit of fiddling with the font sizes, as well as some patience when loading filters (ref. Sven's mail in this thread) it looks and behaves quite OS X like and is more than usable. I'd even go as far as saying it actually looks beautiful, an expression I have not used a lot when comparing X11 apps to "native" apps. Thus, I agree with Sven on the fact that a full port of GTK+2 might not be a requirement at all.

I think making the installation routine as simple as possible is sufficient.

Am Fre, den 26.12.2003 schrieb Sven Neumann um 21:49:

there's another thing I forgot to mention that might be worth to look into when it comes to GIMP on Mac OS X. The new compositing code that Helvetix added already provides the framework for making use of Altivec instructions. If someone has access to a G4/G5 and has some experience with this stuff, it shouldn't be hard to add Altivec code for the most common compositing routines.

All pixel data needs to be aligned on 128bit boundaries to be useful for AltiVec. Last time I looked we couldn't even ensure 32bit alignment (which means that every major platform suffers a lot). While it is possible to realign unaligned data with AltiVec, this is not very efficient for small amounts or non-continuous regions for simple operations.

On Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 06:59:57PM +0100, Sven Neumann wrote:

Porting GTK2 to Quartz could bring some improvements but it isn't a prerequisite for a good user experience of The GIMP on Mac OS X. The one thing that is a lot more important at the moment is to fix bug #102058:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102058

The fact that our shared memory implementation doesn't work on Mac OS X makes our plug-ins run unreasonably slow. This will hurt the user experience a lot more than widgets being drawn by an X11 server which is available, working, supported and fast. So if you think about helping to push GIMP-1.3/2.0 on Mac OS X, you should consider to help us to implement shared memory using mmap or using POSIX shm.

I just checked in an POSIX shm tile transport implementation. I'd like someone on OS X to test it, since I'm not 100% sure how POSIX compliant OS X is, but I'm reasonably sure it works.

It was rather trivial to do, I'm surprised no OS X user took the initiative to fix this long ago.

-Yosh

On OS X.3 it's really that simple. Install X11, XCode, X11dev and maybe BSD tools
to get cvs; get darwinports as described on www.opendarwin.org. Than (after
making dist on Linux to get recent cvs gimp, should work with gimp-1.3.25.tar.gz,
when it is available ;-) :

hbibook:~/gimp-1.3.24 hb$ port install gtk2 hbibook:~/gimp-1.3.24 hb$ port install libart_lgpl (and maybe some few more I don't remember)

hbibook:~/gimp-1.3.24 hb$ export CFLAGS=-I/opt/local/include hbibook:~/gimp-1.3.24 hb$ export CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/local/include hbibook:~/gimp-1.3.24 hb$ export LDFLAGS=-L/opt/local/lib

hbibook:~/gimp-1.3.24 hb$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/local --disable-print
(there is gimpprint-config installed but the corresponding headers are missing)

hbibook:~/gimp-1.3.24 hb$ make hbibook:~/gimp-1.3.24 hb$ sudo make install

Many ... ld: warning multiple definitions of symbol _locale_charset ... and it almost works !

Am 27.12.2003 um 09:39 schrieb Manish Singh:

On Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 06:59:57PM +0100, Sven Neumann wrote:

Porting GTK2 to Quartz could bring some improvements but it isn't a prerequisite for a good user experience of The GIMP on Mac OS X. The one thing that is a lot more important at the moment is to fix bug #102058:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102058

The fact that our shared memory implementation doesn't work on Mac OS X makes our plug-ins run unreasonably slow. This will hurt the user experience a lot more than widgets being drawn by an X11 server which is available, working, supported and fast. So if you think about helping to push GIMP-1.3/2.0 on Mac OS X, you should consider to help us to implement shared memory using mmap or using POSIX shm.

I just checked in an POSIX shm tile transport implementation. I'd like someone on OS X to test it, since I'm not 100% sure how POSIX compliant OS X
is, but I'm reasonably sure it works.

The C code appears to work, but the configure check does not :

configure:15715: checking for shm_open in -lrt configure:15746: gcc -o conftest -g -O2 -Wall conftest.c -lrt >&5 ld: can't locate file for: -lrt

apparently shm_open() is available by libc.dylib - it compiles without any
extra lib (checked by simply replacing -lrt with -lc, real fixing configure is
definitely out of my scope ;)

Thanks, Hans

On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 09:20:56PM +0100, Hans Breuer wrote:

Am 27.12.2003 um 09:39 schrieb Manish Singh:

I just checked in an POSIX shm tile transport implementation. I'd like someone on OS X to test it, since I'm not 100% sure how POSIX compliant OS X
is, but I'm reasonably sure it works.

The C code appears to work, but the configure check does not :

configure:15715: checking for shm_open in -lrt configure:15746: gcc -o conftest -g -O2 -Wall conftest.c -lrt >&5 ld: can't locate file for: -lrt

apparently shm_open() is available by libc.dylib - it compiles without any
extra lib (checked by simply replacing -lrt with -lc, real fixing configure is
definitely out of my scope ;)

Figures. POSIX requires shm_open() to be in librt, hence my questioning of OS X's POSIX compliance was not unfounded. ;)

I'll check in a fixed configure script shortly. Please test it out.

-Yosh

On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 15:33, Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

I'm picking up on an older thread here since there's some good news on the MacOS X subject that should be shared. Since this topic was brought up last, Yosh added a POSIX shared memory implementation that is used on Darwin. Recently GIMP-2.0pre packages appeared for fink (http://mirror.student.iastate.edu/) and today I've been told that GIMP-2.0pre2 has found its way into darwinports (http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/).

What I heard so far these packages work flawlessly and this means that we can say that MacOS X is a fully supported platform for GIMP-2.0. Thanks to everyone who helped to make this happen.

Great news! Some people approached me when I did the FOSDEM GIMP talk on OSX and were very interested in running GIMP on their MacOS. I hope GIMP2 will make a big splash among MacOS users.

cheers