Re: [Gimp-developer] Save/export, option to go back to old behaviour

[Alexia Death <alexiadeath gmail com>]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Graeme Gill <graeme2 argyllcms com> wrote:
> And loss prevention has little or nothing to do with the decision
> to save or export. If you track what features an image uses, then
> you can by default save back to the file format used to open
> the image. Only if some processing operation is performed
> that takes the image outside the capabilities of the originally
> opened file do you have to get the user to decide whether
> to loose information or save as a different format.

Even the act of loading a file into memory as pixel data and then
recompressing on save is lossy for lossy formats and grayscale formats
outright destroy information if the original is color. It is not
realistic to keep track for each format feature by feature, if the
image is now restorably exported or not, it would make maintaining
gimp code and adding features a horror... Each change anywhere would
recquire going over all export plugins making sure their supported
feature lists are up to date... This separation makes it clear cut.
The project file, the one that keeps ervery feature of gimp intact is
the xcf and you save to it. Any rendering you export to. And this
distinction will get even more important when we get to gegl backend
in full.

In short, options were considered, arguments have been had. We didn't
do this to anoy anybody, we did this based on alot of consideration
and a future of GIMP as a nondestructive image editor.

-- 
--Alexia