[Gimp-developer] Easy access for contributors

[grafxuser <gfx user online de>]

Hi,

thanks for your replies. I'm afraid, I was misunterstood.
The point I wanted to outline is not the question, whether a developer 
can setup his environment. Sure he can, if he/she already has enough 
knowledge about the underlying operating system and the IDE itself.
And I already have seen at least one developer who didn't know much 
about the IDE and indeed he wasn't a big help.

But my posting was not about developers only. I wrote about people 
willing to contribute at all, like bug triagers, testers, artists etc.
Do they all need to have administrator and developers skills to just 
start GIMP, try out certain things and tell the results in Bugzilla? - I 
don't think so. Usually you can't expect them to know what 'Build GIMP' 
means or even do it.

What I wanted to say is: if you want more people to contribute, make the 
hurdle as low as possible. It's the difference between inviting people 
and opening the door or keeping it shut.
A pre-built VM is a proposal, which can potential contributors help to 
simply start working. Maybe I can start there, when I have more time and 
it's still an open task. Another way are the ready-to-use builds at 
graphicsall.org. They seem to have quite up-to-date builds of GIMP 
(although I'm surprised to see a built of 2.7.5, while the latest 
developer version is 2.7.4...). If you can recommend the work there, it 
was helpful to place a hyperlink there at your 'Links' page and the 'Get 
involved'-page. It's the simplest and could help a lot.

Also please keep in mind, that I'm honestly not here to nag, but to 
support GIMP development. I'm not a native English speaker, so if there 
are doubts about my words, don't hesitate to kindly ask back.

Best regards,

grafxuser