Re: [Gimp-developer] Re : Feedback from an ordinary user

[Robert Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>]

On Thu, 29 Nov 2012 05:30:35 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 5:10 AM, Monty Montgomery wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine
>>> Democracy is overrated :)
>>
>> Agreed. But despots get their feedback primarily through overripe
>> fruit... and revolutions.
>
> Revolutions? :D
>
> So far it looks rather like "I'm going to be your PITA until you give in".
>
> That's more like terrorism. And I'm not falling for that, my friend.

All right, let's stop this nonsense.

You have every right to do what you please with GIMP.  By the same
token, other people have a right to complain.  And in this situation,
where so many people are complaining so vociferously, you *could* decide
to take a closer look at your assumptions.

I've read your vision statement.  It's fine.  I have no basic quarrel
with it.  But your execution, frankly, sucks.  You've gone out of your
way to try to force everyone, no matter what their needs or how they
work, to embrace your vision of images being "projects", where you
always want to work in the loss-free form and only export the result at
the end into a portable image format.

There are plenty of cases where that's fine.  If I've carefully built a
large panorama, and want to do major work on it, that's exactly what I
do.  Five years ago I put maybe 100 hours of work into this panorama
(http://rlk.smugmug.com/Other/Landscapes/4851912_XB4SmT#!i=450968307&k=29fQmfW),
and you'd better believe I did all the work in XCF format.  I put a
tremendous amount of work into cleaning it up, getting the sky just
right without doing anything to the foliage nearby, and I used a lot of
layers, which was an extremely painful process on the single core with 2
GB that I had at the time.  And I have a lot of other panoramas there
where I've done a lot of work (none as much as that).  Some of them I
did in XCF format, some in TIFF when I didn't need to use layers.  Those
are projects.

But there are plenty of times I'm just interested in fairly minor
tweaking of an image for use as a web graphic or whatnot, and the whole
business of having to export rather than save, and then get nagged to
save even when I'm quite positive I'm never going to need to do anything
else, or if I do, I can accept the data loss (the fact that XCF still is
8-bit only makes it even less tempting to go through all the effort).  I
don't need GIMP to hold my hand through the damn crosswalk.  I've done
enough image editing over the years to have developed judgment about
when I need to take my image editing seriously and when I don't.  If I
open a JPEG file and want to save it back out as a JPEG, I know what I'm
doing.  Maybe you don't think so, but I do.  These are not "projects".
They're quick and dirty one-offs.  I use GIMP because I know it.  I
don't want to go through the bother of learning a different tool just to
edit images I don't want to turn into full-blown projects.  It's not
efficient.

So if I have to support a fork by someone who's going to take users'
needs more seriously, I will.  I'd rather not, because this is a trivial
issue.  But it's a very, very annoying one.
-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk alum mit edu>

MIT VI-3 1987 - Congratulations MIT Engineers men's hoops Final Four!
Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton