[gthumb-list] the ext branch is now public

[Paolo Bacchilega <paolo bacchilega libero it>]

Hello,  I'll try to be as concise as possible :)

The current gthumb version suffers of a series of problems that cannot 
be solved in an evolutionary way:

1) The gnome-vfs to gio port is not trivial for an application whose 
main goal is to work on files.

2) An extensible architecture is required for an application such as 
gthumb that can be viewed as a core that provides file information and a 
series of tools that operate on that files.

3) gthumb uses very old libraries that are going to be deprecated very soon.

4) there are new libraries (such as clutter) that can provide useful 
features and an extensible architecture can be useful to do some 
experimentation.

All these problems combined together have brought me to the conclusion 
that rewriting the code from scratch was a better choice that trying to 
fix the current code base.  At the beginning it was very experimental 
code that's way I kept the branch private, but now it has reached a good 
state and it has proved to be a good base for the next version of gthumb.

The branch has been named ext, which stands for extensions.  Currently 
it lacks many features compared to version 2.10, my plan is to do a 
2.11.1 release as soon as the basic tools are ready. 
I consider basic tools the following:

1) import photos from a camera
2) print images
3) lossless image rotation

then during the 2.11.x series time-line, other important tools will be 
added such as "export as web page", "red eye removal", etc.

If you have read the email till this point I consider you a gthumb hero 
and for this reason let me thank you for your attention :)

Paolo.