gimp

[Nils Philippsen]

On Wed, 2011-08-24 at 10:15 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
> On 08/23/2011 11:34 PM, Itamar Reis Peixoto wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 5:24 PM, Richard Shaw wrote:
> >> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:50 AM, Genes MailLists wrote:
> >>>
> >>>   Are there any plans to bring gimp 2.7.x ->  2.8 into F16 ?
> >>
> >> Is there a specific reason to? The home page states that the whole
> >> 2.7.x series should be considered unstable.
> >
> > is this a good reason ?
> >
> > http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/08/23/1355225/The-GIMP-Now-Has-a-Working-Single-Window-Mode
> 
> No, that single window mode is not such a good reason, the feature is... 
> cute but not excessively useful, the real reason is the 2.8 release is 
> long overdue (expected since last December) and quite a few features 
> were added: more gegl integration, better usability, linked layers etc.
> And we the people using it for real work still remember the times when 
> Fedora used to be a bleeding edge distro and had such GIMP updated... 
> happy old times...

You're probably referring to the updates 2.2->2.4 in '07 and 2.4->2.6 in
'08 but please keep in mind that we're stuck with 2.6.x as the stable
branch since then, so there's no reason to be gloomy about the Fedora
side just yet.

While we mightn't have had an explicit update policy for Fedora in the
time, these packages only went in after thorough testing on top of that
upstream managed to keep things as backwards-compatible as could be
expected -- the built-in scheme interpreter became a bit more strict in
2.6, which was a documented break with 2.4 which could easily be fixed
by fixing affected 3rd party scripts.

Considering that upstream to a large part isn't interested in working on
2.6 anymore -- the last commit by a core developer to this branch was in
February this year -- I don't expect to see another 2.6 bugfix release.
As well, installing both stable versions side-by-side isn't an option as
you can't install them into the same prefix: the libraries have the same
SONAME, the new ones are expected to be ABI compatible. Therefore I
don't see a real alternative to rebasing to 2.8 in stable Fedora
releases when it finally is available, after thoroughly testing it of
course (which I already do to a certain extent, I can e.g. confirm that
the ufraw gimp plugin built with 2.6 works with a private installation
of current git master).

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen      "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase 
Red Hat               a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
nils at redhat.com       nor Safety."  --  Benjamin Franklin, 1759
PGP fingerprint:      C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F  656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011