THE FIRST PLAN INVOLVES SHOUTING! And apparently the Gimp people aren't using any sort of actual blog engine, so it's impossible to permalink the post in question, which is rather confusingly hidden on their front page. Rather than complaining about it, I'll just copy and paste the full text here:
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In the face of all sorts of rumours and interpretations about the future of the project there is a call for clarification regarding development of GIMP.
Currently GIMP team is working on finalizing the new stable v2.8 with many improvements such as layer groups, improved brush dynamics, a new unique transformation tool, optional single-window mode and more. There are two big obstacles in our way right now: missing specification on the last change in user interface and broken graphic tablets support in GTK+.
We have already invested a lot of time into UI changes and brush dynamics, we treasure your continuous support for the project and thus we are determined to release v2.8 only when it's working out of box as expected for everybody.
After releasing v2.8 the focus of development will shift to deep integration of GEGL — our new non-destructive image processing core. Results of this work will enable many features considered critical for use of GIMP in professional environment which is part of GIMP's product vision. It's a lot of work, and currently we don't have enough developers to make this change happen very fast. If you want to help us to get there faster, we encourage you to join gimp-developer mailing list and/or the IRC channel to discuss how you could contribute.
I looked for all caps and didn't find any, then for an exclamation point and found one after "Have fun!" Would you mind clarifying what you meant by your first sentence?
I agree about the nonexistent permalink, though, so thanks for the copy-paste.
I could rant about a few things that bug me, but please let 2.8 bring a single-window UI. That would confirm to me that they're slowly getting towards something more usable.
I sure hope that they will still have the multi window UI, although an optional single window UI might not hurt. I use a dual screen setup with plenty of desktop space and I really prefer the multi-window ui to a single window UI like in photoshop, blender or inkscape.
No matter how big my screen is, I want to have the image/document I edit fullscreened on the other screen and have my tool dialogs on the other. I recon you can do this with Photoshop, but f.ex. Blender cannot do this (limitations with their OpenGL screen setup).
I understand the problem with multi-window UI, other apps' windows might get on the way. I solve the problem by using multiple desktop workspaces.
As far as I can tell, the present GIMP multiple window mode feels pathologically brain dead because the tool windows get hidden by random windows from other applications (how dumb is that? knocking usability down by something like 90%).
If the GIMP was to simply cause the tool windows to appear and disappear "smartly" based on whether a main GIMP window was present, the problem was be much less (I vaguely recall some early versions of some Adobe apps worked this way).
I don't know if this is a better solution but it seems like a very easy solution. I.E., one that might have taken at most a month anywhere along the line (though my guess would be a week or less).
But what do I know, (other than Linux GUI programing with C++ and QT)?
They have been promising the transition to GEGL for so long, it is practically vaporware. Yes, I realize that there are GEGL-based effects in the current builds - but I don't GEGL replacing the current core for a long time - and I have my doubts it ever will.
Maybe the lack of devs? I cannot imagine which commercial company would be interested in supporting GIMP development. Let's face it, financial support for open-source software development is critical (KDE/Gnome may be the exception, but the financial investment into these two may be justified indirectly). ImageMagick fit the niche that the web needs server-side image processing library and made money from it. But GIMP is client-side, semi-professional image processing software, who have the incentive to financially support it? (Maybe some professional graphic design companies, but again, they may not have the top-dev for image processing software, that is a big investment for them). I may miss something here, please correct me if I do so.
There is also a more general problem that Gimp is hard to build. I was doing some JavaFX exporter fixes and getting the environment right took most of the time. Otherwise, I found the code base quite clean.
Let's face it, financial support for open-source software development is critical (KDE/Gnome may be the exception, but the financial investment into these two may be justified indirectly).
Well, in the case of KDE there's Qt licensing. I seem to recall some commercial support for Gnome as well.
I don't disagree with anything that you say. Don't get me wrong. I am not blaming the devs or criticizing them. The work they have done is wonderful. But the state of development and the obstacles to taking this forward are what they are.
That's a fair point, but GEGL is actually a thing now, and you can actually use a cut-down, GEGL only GIMP. I think we're beyond the `vaporware' stage.
----
In the face of all sorts of rumours and interpretations about the future of the project there is a call for clarification regarding development of GIMP.
Currently GIMP team is working on finalizing the new stable v2.8 with many improvements such as layer groups, improved brush dynamics, a new unique transformation tool, optional single-window mode and more. There are two big obstacles in our way right now: missing specification on the last change in user interface and broken graphic tablets support in GTK+.
We have already invested a lot of time into UI changes and brush dynamics, we treasure your continuous support for the project and thus we are determined to release v2.8 only when it's working out of box as expected for everybody.
After releasing v2.8 the focus of development will shift to deep integration of GEGL — our new non-destructive image processing core. Results of this work will enable many features considered critical for use of GIMP in professional environment which is part of GIMP's product vision. It's a lot of work, and currently we don't have enough developers to make this change happen very fast. If you want to help us to get there faster, we encourage you to join gimp-developer mailing list and/or the IRC channel to discuss how you could contribute.