Michael J Hammel wrote:

1. Developer Wishlist

A loooong time ago there was a wish list of features for GIMP. Is there any such thing now, specifically as seen from the developers point of view?

The real wishlist is the collection of enhancement requests on Bugzilla. You can also look at some of the suggestions that were proposed as projects for the Goggle Summer-of-Code program, at

http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/SummerOfCode

These do not, however, include features that will depend on the GEGL framework that is planned to be used for the next major version of GIMP, which include effect layers, layer groups, and 16-bit-depth layers.

2. The 5 most annoying GIMP bugs

I'll skip this one.

6 (sic). Important bug fixes provided by non-core developers

Anyone with input on fixes supplied by someone who just sort of came out of the blue? The magazine feels this is important to encourage others who aren't currently actively involved in making important contributions.

There isn't really a hard distinction between core and non-core devlopers, more of an exponential curve of involvement. Also, most of the people who are more or less heavily involved started out by submitting a patch for something that ame to their attention: me, for example. If you want something more concrete, you can look through the ChangeLog in the source code, searching for the term "patch", and you will see brief descriptions of things submitted by a couple of dozen people who don't contribute regularly to GIMP. The most common are probably fixes or improvements for plug-ins, but there are other things too.

Best wishes, -- Bill

______________ ______________ ______________ ______________ Sent via the CNPRC Email system at primate.ucdavis.edu

I don't know the nature of your magazine/article. But you might consider 7. Non-code contributors. If the goal is to get people involved, it never hurts to address those who can write plugins, tutorials, documentation,...

On Wed, 10 May 2006, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 13:52:24 -0600 From: Michael J. Hammel
To: GIMP Developer Mailing List
Subject: [Gimp-developer] RFC: three questions for the LXF article

If anyone wants to comment on these, please feel free.

1. Developer Wishlist

A loooong time ago there was a wish list of features for GIMP. Is there any such thing now, specifically as seen from the developers point of view?

Anything and everything marked as enhancement in Bugzilla?

2. The 5 most annoying GIMP bugs

Totally subjective, but please feel free to comment on these. I know the two I've heard the most are that GIMP uses SDI instead of MDI and that the menus don't read like Photoshops (two that I, personally, think are irrelevent, but who am I to say what's relevent?).

I'd qualify that complaint a little further. The GIMP uses CSDI, a controlled Single Document Interface, where the Toolbox is the control window[1] unlike the SDI used in Inkscape and various Gnome applications. This makes the GIMP quite unusual and unfamiliarity is enough to put off many users (but then there are other issues besides that). The biggest supporters of this scheme are users with dual head setups or a complex window manager (ie not Metacity or Windows). I would not mention the "instead of MDI" (Window in Window like Photoshp for Microsoft platforms) because that presumes too much about the best alternative.

The menus not reading like photoshop increases the learning curve allowign users to leverage existing knowledge and makes it more difficult to reuse all those photoshop tutorials out there. The point I regularly make is that I'd be a lot happier if things were _the same or better than photoshop_ i.e. unless there was a specific reason to do things differently they would be the same. However the default position remains to only copy photoshop when there is a distinct benefit to doing so. I don't think this is a particularly significant problem in the grand scheme of things but it is a realtively easy complaint for users to identify and put the blame here for other difficulties they might be having trying to learn the software.

Von: Alan Horkan

On Wed, 10 May 2006, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 13:52:24 -0600 From: Michael J. Hammel

If anyone wants to comment on these, please feel free.

1. Developer Wishlist

A loooong time ago there was a wish list of features for GIMP. Is there any such thing now, specifically as seen from the developers point of view?

Anything and everything marked as enhancement in Bugzilla?

Is this GIMP Wish list one of the following?

http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/gimp/mjhammel/wishlist.html http://jerhard.org/computers/contribute/gimp/wishlist/

It would be worthwhile to check if there is anything not yet in Bugzilla.

HTH, Michael