[Gimp-developer] Proposal for fulfilling a feature request

[Benjamin Johnson <bjohnson lane gmail com>]

Hey There GIMP Devs,

I am representing a team of 5 students who want to make some contributions to the GIMP project as a small part of our coursework for CSCI 462 Software Engineering Practicum. Thus far, our involvement has been pretty minor. To get our feet wet, we worked on a resolution for bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589229, and we had a great experience with that. Now we are ready to get our hands dirty to make a bit more substantial of a contribution.

Our proposal is as follows, and we would appreciate any feedback and direction that you have to offer:

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Original feature request: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329464 "Add a 'check for updates' online menu entry" 

The plugin will be an option accessible from the help menu named “Update.” Once clicked, it will use an appropriate PDB procedure to get the URI which will return the latest stable release data in the form of XML (the URI with the release data would ideally be made available on gimp.org). A comparison will be made between the user's current version and the latest available version, and if the latest version is newer and the user chooses to update, the plugin would attempt to either update GIMP for the user or direct them to the latest download online.

Considerations have been made to disable the option if the user has a version of GIMP built from the git repository, though this will be an additional part of the plugin to be developed later once the core functionality has been implemented and tested.

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We appreciate your time, and look forward to your responses,

Ben Johnson