Re: [Gimp-gui] Gimp purpose

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

Hello,

On 2018-02-18 19:40, Michal Vašut wrote:
> Hello, out of curiosity, what is the main purpose / objective of Gimp?
> It's not ment as offence, but more like academic question. You have
> already defined some user scenarios (use cases) at
> https://gui.gimp.org/index.php?title=User_Scenarios [1] but I don't
> see any coordinated work to accomplish one of those use cases.  Or in
> other words let's look at similar projects:
>
> Krita - objective: painting program (does good job in this)
> Raw Therapee and DarkTable - objective: work with raw photos
> Blender: also many use cases (movies, architecture visualization, game
> assets), but doing their projects (Sintel, Big Buck Bunny, Elephants
> Dreams, ...), where they address artists needs and improve the program
> that way.
>
> Don't get me wrong, you are doing great job, but I don't see the goal
> and Gimp only scratches surface of use cases specified above. Why is
> that or am I missing something?

First time I read that GIMP only "scratches" the surface of the use 
cases you tell about. This is a pretty accomplished tool for painting as 
well as for photography. It doesn't do 3D but this has never been its 
area of activity (though I could see interesting usage of 3D within 2D 
raster images, so why not).

It's even funny that you compare it to Blender which is kind of similar 
within its own usages (3D) since it has a very wide range of use cases 
as well. Blender is quite a generic tool in the 3D business (compared to 
other software which are more into specializing into this or that).

Basically GIMP is a generic raster graphics software. It is indeed not 
trying to specialize as much as others, and personally that's why also 
which I like a lot, because I consider that many of these use cases in 
the end overlap in the end. So a lot of the specialized software 
actually end up also getting the same more generic features as well.

Anyway not really sure at all what your critics are, to be clear.

> Is that caused by lack of resources (devs, money, ...)? From user
> point of view when looking on roadmap and release notes, you are
> implementing:
>
>         * Necessary things to move Gimp forward (GEGL, GTK3 port, ...)
>         * not so important (lets say geeks stuff) - ie. Improve animation

Ok. How is "animation" geek stuff? GIMP is currently used professionally 
for animation, by a film director and animator who is paid for this and 
does this for a living. How is this a "geek stuff"?

As a general fact, I think animation film is quite a big business even, 
and calling it "geek stuff" is quite hard to understand. Maybe you 
should tell this to the cinema business that they should stop doing geek 
stuff.

Also why when the other software implement the same features (2 of the 4 
other software you cited have animation features), that would be ok, but 
when GIMP does it, it becomes "geek stuff"?
I'm really trying to understand the logics.

> features (why Gimp needs this?)

GIMP does not "need" anything. GIMP is not a person. On the other hand, 
GIMP is made by people, and these people indeed need and want features. 
That's how these happen.
We need animation, so we implement animation. Once again, we are even 
talking of a "for a living" feature, which is used for daily work by 
people working professionally.

> or HGT file importer (what is the
> percentage of users that will use it?)

Indeed, how many? No idea. Does it bother you that the feature is in 
because you don't need it? Is the presence of this feature actually 
bothering you or preventing you from doing things in GIMP?

The story of this feature was basically this: (1) someone needed this 
feature and made a feature request which stayed in our bug tracker for 
about a year. (2) one of our usual contributor decided to give it a try 
and made a patch (why? No idea. Maybe because he himself needed it; or 
maybe he thought that was a cool idea and a cool format… who cares? In 
the end, he did it). (3) Since the patch was there, I reviewed the code 
(the alternative would be to never answer; so basically throw away this 
contributor's work, which is not a nice alternative), then after 
discussion, I pushed it, and finally improved the support a bit more 
myself, while I was at it.

The whole feature must have taken about a few hours of the time of a few 
people. The consequences of these few hours were people happy to get the 
feature. Nobody was harmed, not other feature lost. What should we have 
done? Just refuse the patch which was provided because not enough people 
need it (which we don't actually even know; maybe in fact there are a 
lot of people happy with this support)?
In the end, probably just discussing why adding the feature here will 
waste more of developer time than the time actually taken to implement 
it.

So once again, I'm not sure where you are going with your remarks.

> Thanks for ansvering.

You are welcome.

I'm sorry if I seem a bit snappy on my answer, but you have been 
questionning a few of the features I have worked on (or am working on) 
so really I am wondering why you show these as being a problem.
I really don't want any conflict, but I don't see how else I can answer 
to an email where you are basically asking us to explain (or even 
"excuse") our actions as though we were wrong doing them.

This is Free Software in the making here. You are welcome to contribute 
other features if you wish, but that's really not cool to come and 
basically tell other people stuff are useless (or to be more accurate 
"geek stuffs" and "not so important").

Now I hope there are no hard feelings and I am very happy to answer 
other messages which are a bit more opened to what other people do, need 
and think as important, which is not for anyone else to decide. :-)
Thanks!
Regards,

Jehan

> Michal
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] https://gui.gimp.org/index.php?title=User_Scenarios
>
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> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-gui-list

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