Re: [Gimp-developer] GIMP 1.8.2 for Mac (official?) Build

[Clayton Walker <blender3dartist gmail com>]

Simone Karin Lehmann, let me first go into some history. I was once looking for an image editor for Mac, with capabilities similar to PS, but without the huge pricetag. I found gimp. Back then, my main OS was Tiger, and there wasn't as much support for free software back then as there is now. I stumbled upon your packages after a bit of Googling, and downloaded them. After getting used to X11, and it's habits, Gimp+X11 became my main image editor of choice.

That was over 4 years ago.

After years went by, I felt that I wasn't really contributing to the Gimp project. X11 slowly became an annoyance, because I could never get used to the idea of using two programs to run one. It went against the "Apple philosophy" (which is bullshit, now that I think about it), and it increased startup times. Also I didn't like the fact that it'd just sit there in my Dock all day.

So I decided to do some digging. After a few weeks of dinking around, I finally got gtk to build with the quartz variant in MacPorts. That was a neat day. Of course I quickly got bored of it, and continued to use the X11 version. After all, like you had said, "this page doesn't look very promising..." and provided a link to the quartz integration.

But that's changing. And I wanted to be a part of that change. So after John Ralls continued development of gtk-osx, jhbuild and gtk-mac-bunlder, and Jesse had ported gedit running gtk3 over to the mac, I decided it was time to see if the same technology could be applied to gimp. After building a gtk stack from source using jhbuild as a base, I slowly built up a custom module including gimp and all of it's dependencies. (This can be viewed here.)

2.8 was released, and I still didn't have a build I wanted to call stable, or even semi-stable for that matter. A few months pass, and suddenly quite a few changes happen. The glitches are ironed out, glib fixes appear, gtk fixes appear, and even changes to gimp itself start to appear.

The week before 2.8.2 was released, I had (in my own private repo) a working jhbuild setup with pressure support (thanks Daniel Sabo!) and color management started working again (thanks Kristian Rietveld!), and now we're working on lcms2 (thanks Elle Stone!). Thanks to everyone so far, Gimp has really had a boost in development.

So what I'm trying to say is that I'm not trying to demean your work, or to replace your work. I'm trying to provide an alternative to X11, not an alternative to you. Of course we know you could provide a native build (and probably a better one that I could :D), so what I'm trying to do is provide a working gimp environment which doesn't require X11, and I'm doing the best I can.

Care to not leave? We could use the help. ;)

Yours truly,

Clayton Walker

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Simone Karin Lehmann wrote:

Simone,

First of all, you have my word of honor (such as is left of it) that
nobody was targeting to kick you out.

Most of development talks happen on IRC. It's where we make decisions.
It so happened that the new contributor was around on the channel to
solve his issues with building a native version, and before we knew he
started banging out patches hand over fist.

Now, onto the matter.

> But, back to the main topic. What's the advantage of a so called 'native'
> build? The menu bar at the top? Not using X11? From this point of view, even
> most Linux versions aren't native. Or does a 'native' version magically
> solve all kind of problems? Is it about toolkits or software layers? Is GTK+
> native and XQuartz not? Is the cairo quartz backend a native OS X feature or
> just another kind of software layer between the application and the OS X
> graphical libraries and routines?
>
> IMO a native version of an application is more than only the use of a
> specific toolkit or software layer. IMO a native application should use
> standard native functionality. And yes, the menu bar at the top is one. But
> does your 'native' version use the native OS X file dialog, the native print
> functionality and dialogs, or does it use native ColorSync. No. Or new
> security features like Gatekeeper. No.

While I agree that more work has to be done to make GIMP more native
on OSX, an official no X11 build is a first major step for wider
adoption of the application. People have been asking for that for a
long, long time, and even refusing to install X11-dependent version.

> And even further, having your targeted user audience in mind, the official
> build lacks functionality Mac users got used to in the past  years: a set of
> plugins offering advanced photo retousching and workflow, locally
> installable user manuals, support for various OS versions and architectures.

This is something Clayton was interested to work on.

Personally I'd like to see a _team_ of Mac contributors. Seeing one
important community member (you) go away because the other happened to
be in the right time in the right place sounds like communication
breakdown to me. I'd rather avoid that.

Whatever your final decision is, I'm thankful for the support you
provided to our Mac users.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org

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