[Gegl-developer] note to packagers: partially desynchronising babl, GEGL and GIMP releases cycles

[Øyvind Kolås <pippin gimp org>]

Packagers for linux distributions should update the recipes for babl
and GEGL, and new releases of GIMP 2.10.6 for flatpak/snap/OSX/windows
with the new babl and GEGL is desirable.

Before in the 2.10 releases we have synchronized the releases of babl,
GEGL and GIMP. This synchronization has been a by-product of work on
finishing the GIMP release have resulted in additional commits to
GEGL; and thus coordinating the releases have been neccessary also to
have a properly building GIMP. As the 2.10 series stabilizes and
releases become less frequent we can expect having babl and GEGL
releases also in-between future stable GIMP releases.

babl-0.1.58 and GEGL-0.4.10 have already been released this month

Building the previous release of GIMP-2.10 with the new babl will fix
regressions the 2.10 series of GIMP has had over 2.8 in workflows
involving first transforming or deforming a layer. These operations
now maintain the color of fully transparent pixels, thus making
anti-erase mode of the paint tools and the alpha channel mode of the
curves tool.

GEGL has an important display fix for OSX, where severe display
glitches on some zoom levels now are gone.

These changes come In addition to performance improvements, in
particular babl is now doing (most) reference computations in 32bit
floating point rather than 64bit floating point speeding up initial
and some runtime pixel format conversions, for more complete release
note for babl-0.1.58 and GEGL-0.4.10 including internal refactoring
and new features, see their respective NEWS files.

Øyvind Koås