Von: Alexander Rabtchevich

Your solution is too much complicated. Current situation with "hidden" binaries is much more acceptable from my POV. As the practice shows, the persons who want to obtain bleeding edge version ask for it at the yahoo win Gimp users group. They obtain the answer - some kind of "look through the links at the site". And they find the executable they want. And in you case they would have to compile Gimp themselves or search for the person who would kindly do it for them.

Also, in order to really test a current version of GIMP, one should be able to run it in a debugger, for example gdb - and to be able to apply patches, build it again and check if the problem still happens. In order to be useful, this requires some parts of MinGw already.

P.S. There is still no 2.3.8 compiled at the usual palace ;)

Jernej was working on packaging the 0.10 release of the documentation - as this is intended for the stable version and contains many additions compared to 0.9, it has a higher priority than getting a 2.3.8 installer out.

The comments up to now were insightful, and I want to add a bit more background info about this.

In the last development cycle, there were no binaries for development releases before the final release candidates at all. We need more people from the windows platform to become new developers, not just users who are running the unstable bleeding edge version.

Oh, and one of the things someone who wants to try GIMP 2.3.x can do wrong is to remove GIMP 2.2, or "install over it" - part of the testing is comparison to 2.2, and you obviously still want to get some work done as well.

The intention of the somewhat hidden installers is to sieve users who think about such things first.

HTH,
Michael