[gimp-web] Cutting down on repetitions in my interview, and answering the last question.

[Pat David <patdavid src gnome org>]

commit 96e87d0de48e5c2c16cd33cecedc1ebc7739c9ac
Author: Michael Schumacher <schumaml gmx de>
Date:   Sat Apr 22 22:03:19 2017 +0200

    Cutting down on repetitions in my interview, and answering the last question.

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+Title: An Interview with Michael Schumacher, GIMP administrator
+Date: 2017-04-19
+Category: News
+Authors: Jehan
+Status: draft
+Summary: Michael Schumacher gets interviewed by other GIMP developers
+
+*This is the second of a series of interviews of various people surrounding GIMP development and community. 
See also the [interview of Mitch, GIMP 
maintainer](https://www.gimp.org/news/2017/03/01/an-interview-with-michael-natterer-gimp-maintainer/)*
+
+GIMP is not only made by hard-core developers. The team also encourages less technical-inclined 
contributors. Michael Schumacher, *aka* Schumaml, is a good example of such a core contributor, as he has had 
a very important impact for over more than 10 years. Mostly known as the project administrator, nowadays he 
takes care of everything but coding: administrative tasks, management…
+
+Furthermore Schumaml was recently named the maintainer of the 2.8 branch, the stable version of GIMP which 
only receives bugfixes, showing that it does not require a technically-focused mind to occupy important roles 
successfully.
+
+This interview was held on Saturday, February 4, 2017, at about 00:27 AM in front of a fireplace and after a 
day of hacking at Wilber Week. With us were several team members, including Debarshi Ray (Rishi (R)), Øyvind 
Kolås (pippin (P)) and Simon Budig (Nomis (N)) who also asked questions.
+
+<figure>
+<img src="{filename}images/schumaml-interview/schumaml-interview-950w.jpg" alt='Schumaml, the tie-bearing 
GIMP office manager' width='950' height='566'>
+<figcaption>
+Schumaml, the tie-bearing GIMP office manager.
+</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+_Jehan: Hello Michael. You are GIMP administrator, at least that's what everybody says._
+
+**Schumaml:** That's what everybody says, yes.
+
+_J: How would you describe your contribution to the GIMP project?_
+
+**S:** I don't do much coding. It's just that so many people — from my perspective — do coding on GIMP 
already and have a better grasp of source code, how it is made up. So I don't think I can contribute much in 
that regard. So I try to do administrative stuff like handling the monetary aspect of the project like 
telling GNOME that we need money for events like Wilber Week, for LGM reimbursements…
+<br/>
+I also care about the bug reports we have. I try to have them categorized, have a proper status, make sure 
that they get replies, that we don't leave a bug report unattended for a long time.
+<br/>
+And also I have administrative privileges on the GIMP web server, on mailing lists, and… what else. Do I 
forget anything? That's about it, yeah.
+
+I've been called the tie-wearing GIMP office manager, and I even got a t-shirt with a printed tie and a 
"TWOM" label, because I've actually been wearing a proper shirt (made to measure) in one GIMP meeting, at the 
Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 in Vienna.
+
+<br/>
+_J: How long have you contributed?_
+
+**S:** I think I started somewhere between 2001 and 2004. The first contributions were probably getting GIMP 
buildable on MSYS, the minimal GNU build system on the Windows platform. Because I was annoyed that there 
were only GIMP builds for releases and not for every commit in between.
+
+_J: Was it like nightly builds?_
+
+**S:** No it was not like nightly builds. I just wanted to be able to have a current build **for** the MS 
Windows platform and also made **on** the MS Windows platform, so that I could build on my Windows system I 
was using at the time. Yes, just be able to follow GIMP development more closely than for example a build 
someone made for a development release.
+
+_J: So you mostly use GIMP on Windows?_
+
+**S:** Back more than 10 years ago, I did use Windows exclusively. So basically back then I had done the 
porting of GIMP to the Windows platform.
+
+<br/>
+_J: Do you use GIMP?_
+
+**S:** I use GIMP. Not as much as many other people but I use it to test many things of GIMP itself. I use 
it to edit photos I make. I don't publish many of the images because when I'm editing them, I print them or I 
use them for some documentation work, so it goes to a customer. I even still use it on MW Windows still. But 
now my main platform is Linux.
+
+_J: What kind of job do you do?_
+
+**S:** I'm working for a company that used to be a part of Siemens, which had been carved out by now. And we 
are selling communication systems - in the past, you would have called these telephony systems. Nowadays this 
stuff is called "Communication Enabled Business Processes". Like everything which has to do with 
communication. Calling someone or texting someone or exchanging chats or whatever. And we are providing the 
software, the service and the consulting.
+
+<br/>
+_J: Why do you contribute to GIMP?_
+
+**S:** It started due to pure selfishness: being able to have the most current GIMP available to me.
+<br />
+Since then, a lot has changed: I believe in Free Software. I believe software should be available for 
everyone for every purpose. GIMP is a Free Software project. Around the time I got hooked up to GIMP, I also 
got hooked up to Wikipedia, which follows the same approach towards knowledge. I feel like — yeah well — I'm 
contributing to something that helps a lot of people all over the world. I think that's a good thing. And 
GIMP happens to be the the first major project I contributed to. And I like it. It's also in-line with the 
topics I specialized in at university: image synthesis, image manipulation. Kind of seem like a logical 
extension.
+
+<br/>
+_Rishi: What do you think of Michael Schumacher?_
+
+**S:** (laughs) The formula one driver?
+
+_R: Yeah._
+
+**S:** First thing, you know about his current condition, like probably still in the coma or a vegetable. 
Surely I hope that he will get better. He probably won't make it to his former self but at least to a state 
that he can live his remaining life in a somewhat decent way.
+He got famous when I was in the so-called German "Gymnasium" (part of secondary education). It was a bit of 
an annoyance. I got the same nickname "Schumy" as he did. I didn't follow his career too closely, but nkew 
about every race he won because I would be congratulated at school.
+
+_pippin: Have you ever made use of sharing the name?_
+
+**S:** No I haven't. It got me an interview opportunity with a locale radio station because they were 
calling all people who beared the name "Michael Schumacher" and they were asking them "How hard does this 
affect your personal life? Has it ever affected you?". Once, I almost had an appointment canceled because 
someone thought I was mocking him, but that was the only incident ever.
+
+I've never used it, I've never abused it. And nowadays, or after the end of his professional racing career, 
it basically didn't matter anymore.
+
+<br/>
+_P: Any controversial theme you wish to be asked?_
+
+**S:** Like the fact that I would like to kill spammers? (Maintain several mailing lists, one forum and also 
be a recipient for "can we haz ads on gimp.org, plz?" and you know what I mean)
+
+_Nomis: Not very controversial._
+
+<br/>
+_J: What do you want to see in GIMP?_
+
+**S:** Feature-wise, I'm quite OK with what GIMP is right now. I have to admit that some of the current 
stuff in the GIMP development version is still above my head - like for example, I have no real concept yet 
of the difference of compositing and blending. Learning that it was 2 different things was quite useful. I 
hope that we can get the documentation of GIMP up-to-speed in time.
+
+I'm more concerned about the project management. As in how do we decide what new feature go into GIMP, how 
do we decide how they get into GIMP, how do we decide what GIMP development will look like, for instance 
post-2.10. Because you see it yourself, right now, our release cycles are much too long. Even the fact that 
we have actual release cycles is probably bad. If you have a look at services like Twitter or similar, they 
are constantly releasing. They just push new features out to the people and there is a constant review "this 
is working, this is not working".  With our long release cycles, users get surprised by "Ouh this does not 
work as it usede to. Why have they changed it?".
+
+But yeah, the project is still a bit old-fashioned in regard to releases. We are trailing current 
development models. "Development models" is the term I use because I'm not even really familiar how you call 
this. I'm intrigued by the idea of having stable branches with continuously added new features, but I'm not 
quite sure if I want 2.10 to be constantly evolving. I would prefer to have 2.12. That's details.
+
+<br/>
+_J: How do you see GIMP in 20 years?_
+
+**S:** First thing in 20 years, I'll be 60 (laughs). So I'm not even sure how I see myself at that point. 
Well, let's be selfish. I very much would like to see myself still part of the project in 20 years. I would 
still like to be able to see it as an image manipulation program. One of the major Free Software ones. And I 
have no idea at all how it will look like (laughs) because there is so much that can change. Especially even 
in the user interaction. How people interact with software might actually be the defining factor for how 
applications will look in 20 years.
+
+<br/>
+_J: What's **the** feature you are really waiting for?_
+
+**S:** The feature I'm really waiting for. It's not a feature of painting or image manipulation. It's about 
organization. This thing we want to do, Plug-in or Ressource Registry 2.0. Properly built, really managed. 
Like not the hand-duplicate of an existing plugin. The thing we talked so much about, have so many great 
ideas, but always seem to lack the time to do it. This is the feature I would like to see. 
+
+<br/>
+_J: Do you contribute under influence?_
+
+**S:** Yeah, have a look at the 2.8.20 NEWS file, at the typos, which I did totally not notice. So now I 
prefer to not contribute under influence.
+
+_J: Indeed you are now the maintainer of the 2.8 branch, or at least the releaser. If not mistaken, you took 
care of 2.8.18 and 2.8.20 releases. What can you say about this?_
+
+**S:** I guess I should start at why I am doing more 2.8 releases. As I explained before, I'm not interested 
in coding that much, but much more engaged in user support and maintenance. Approximately one month before 
the release of 2.8.18, we had received [a report about a security issue in the XCF loading 
code](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=767873). It was fixed quickly, for both the development and 
2.8 branches, but there was no plan to do a 2.8 release. We have instructions for this, and mitch replied 
"Just do it!" when I asked about it.
+
+It still felt like partly flying blind. Had I done the version changes - to 2.8.18, and afterwards advancing 
to 2.8.19 - correctly? Was the tarball made correctly? Would it build on any other system than mine? It did - 
but I had still missed two action: the release tag is supposed to be signed (i.e. git tag -s), and the GNOME 
translations teams should be notified about planned releases and a string freeze be put in place until the 
release to make it easy for them to complete translations. 2.8.20 was much better prepared, and even had an 
extra long string freeze - I had planned to do it in October 2016, but had to delay it to February 2017, 
during Wilber Week.
+
+Releasing is definitely something you want to do right, and this means to take a moment of uninterrupted 
time to do it, like a GIMP event I have in my schedule already. My approach towards bug handling has changed 
a bit, too. I pay much more attention to bugs with attached patches, and try to apply and test those (we 
really neglected to do this) in order to get them into a stable release.
+
+_J: This was a good interview._
+
+**S:** Thank you for doing it.
+
+_J: And thank you for answering._
+
+<small>Images in this post are courtesy of antenne and used by permission (<a class='cc' 
href='https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/' title='Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 
International'>cba</a>).</small>