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

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

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