Don't know if any of you ever read it, but I've been doing a GIMP tutorial column for Linux Format magazine (in the UK) for about 3 years. I recently retired that column so I could start writing about other things (like embedded stuff for LWN.net - coming soon - and other stuff for LXF), but LXF made one final GIMP request: a big article on getting involved with GIMP development. I've agreed to do the article. I think this would be a great way to help improve development, test and documentation involvement by the GIMP user community.

The editors apparently saw (or maybe just heard of) Karine Delvare's lecture at the Libre Graphics conference recently and wanted the article to be based on or at least make it similar to that talk. I don't have any information on the lecture, so if anyone saw it and took notes (in english - I think the talk was in French) please let me know.

The article will be about 4000 words (pretty hefty for the typical user magazine) and will be in two parts: An overview followed by a case study (re: example of getting involved). The deadline for the article is May 11th. Sorry I couldn't give more time on this, but that's the way of the magazine world. :-)

I'm looking for feedback on this (see below) from both core developers as well as casual (infrequent) contributors and end users. The article is primarily about the source development process but I'm also interested in areas like infrastructure issues (CVS and server management: Manish, is that you these days?), advocacy and documentation support. I've been an outsider looking in for a long time now so I've lost track of who's working on what (other than Sven and David). Any old timers still around: feel free to drop me a line just for grins - it would be interesting to hear what you're up to these days (Miles, Adam, who else did I miss?).

Here is a summary of what we're looking for in this article:

Part I: Overiew and History - Overview of the development process: design/planning, development, bugfixing, and release - Who are the current GIMP core developers? - The joys of bugfixing and generally being involved in a project's development - preferrably from a non-core developer's point of view - Overview of Bugzilla
- This history of the GIMP CVS repository: access and support - Where to go for help: mailing lists, web sites

Part II: Getting Involved 1. Finding a bug and how to reproduce it simply. 2. Reporting the bug.
3. Finding the broken code (show code) 4. Fixing it (print the solution too) 5. Making a patch file and submitting the fix (step by step).

Additional info (usually presented in sidebars): 1. Photos of developers and/or people I correspond with and are quoted in this article
2. 1 sidebar on Writing a GIMP Plugin 3. One or more of the following:
a. 1 sidebar on GEGL
b. 1 sidebar on Developer Wishlist c. 1 sidebar on the 5 most annoying GIMP bugs d. 1 sidebar on important bug fixes provided by non-core developers

Any additional advocacy information is also welcome (Carol, you've got lots there, right?).

The "annoying bugs" should come from non-developers because we want to show people what needs to be fixed as encouragement to have them come fit it.

Any feedback on this is welcome. If I get a lot of feedback I obviously won't be able to quote (or use pictures of) everyone. But I'll do my best. If anyone has group photos of the core team, that would be helpful, preferrably scanned or taken at a very high resolution.

I've reviewed the GIMP web sites in the recent past but will be thumbing my way through them again just to catch anything I missed.

Thanks. I look forward to hearing from everyone and to writing this article - it should be very enlightening to me as well!