You already got in touch with the relevant party. Adding support for higher color depths to GIMP is on the roadmap and will be addressed as soon as GIMP 2.4 is done. The plan is to use GEGL (http://gegl.org/). Part of it has already been written but this work had been abandoned for a while. Incidentally we only yesterday decided to pick up work on this library again. Mitch, Pippin and me will be reviewing and cleaning up the code over the next days. If you want to help, we can certainly need help in this area. At the moment I can not really tell you exactly what needs to be done but I should be able to tell you in a couple of days.

Sven

I just wanted to wish the three of you the best of luck on the upcoming gegl work. I hope you can get gegl back on its feet again. I have had no time for looking at these things for a couple of years now, and I wish I could offer more than just listening along.

At any rate, feel free to redo/change/throw away whatever is there that I may have worked on in the past. Some of the things I believe are the right approach but some things may not have been.

If you get enough momentum up on the project again I hope you can get a big crowd working on it...

Good luck!

Calvin