I've noticed there seems to be a great deal of negativity on this malling list that stems from people (myself included, unfortunately) attempting to make suggestions about topics that I get the impression have been discussed to death already.

This used to be a problem for blender, as well (though nowhere near as bad as you guys get it). We solved it by writing a new developers introduction page on the wiki, which seemed to help our situation a lot. Having something similar, only maybe more of an intro to gimp-developers, might help here. Something linked to on the gimp mailing lists page. Another option would be to expand the gimp developer FAQ and link to it on the malling list page. Or perhaps there could just be a link to the task list page (is there an official one yet?) for 2.6.

Content I can think of that would be useful for people signing up for gimp-developers include:

* A notice to read the current task list, if there's an official one yet. * Certain commonly raised issues, such as "yes, the devs do listen to users", or "the task list is too long, so we're not taking more feature requests" etc.

Of course these are just things I've picked up on the list in my short time of actually reading it regularly. I'm sure there's a lot more. I'd be willing to put something together on the gimp wiki; I don't think it would be appropriate for me to actually write this sort of thing, but I could condense agreed-on content discussed here, or somethin.

Joe