Re: [Gimp-gui] Gimp purpose

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

Hi!

Didn't see this email. It went to my spam box, and I discovered it this 
morning thanks to your new email.

On 2018-02-20 23:41, Michal Vašut wrote:
> With good intent ... it backfired on me. Well, let's try again
> different way.

Yeah sorry for the backfiring. When writing my first answer, I knew it 
was not wise (it never is) to take it personally but you were listing 
explicitly stuff that I worked on in your "not important" list so it's a 
little hard not to (take it personally).
Actually I might have taken it badly even if that were not features I 
did. Many people take of their personal time to improve GIMP and I would 
not really like that any contributor's work is being disdained either.

Basically next time, try to think twice before you call other people's 
work "not so important geek stuff". :-)

For myself, I know I should not have reacted either, so I am sorry for 
this.

> The main point of my previous post was not losing focus of main goals.
> (and you already defined those - mentioned above). Do you remember

Actually I know the goals you mentionned, but I don't agree with them. I 
was not there back when they were defined and I think them to be a bit 
limitative. Already back then, GIMP could do much more. In particular it 
clearly turns around digital painting without ever naming it. And 
fortunately other devs never tried to discourage me from wanting to 
improve painting-related features (or add painting features themselves). 
Otherwise I would have been long gone (along with all my many commits in 
the last few years).

So sometimes it is a good thing to not stick by completely artificial 
goals written by people who don't actually use the program daily (as was 
the case here).

> burning SW Nero Burning ROM? From the beginning it was great single
> purpose application that allowed creating and copying CDs / DVDs. Then
> they added movie cutting app, photo collection manager and another SW
> and it started its end. I don't wish to Gimp ending like that.
>
> > 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.
>
> No doubt about it.
>
> > 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).
>
> Hell no, God save us from that. Gimp is 2D manipulation SW not 3D. Its
> better to use specialized SW for special use cases.
>
> > 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).
>
> Well the point was, that they are similar in this aspect (many use
> cases), but Blender handles it better, because it has special
> perspective for special use case. (ie. you are programmer so you know
> that for debugging, you need different set of tools than for writing
> code or designing forms and the same applies for graphics - for
> creating icons some set of tools [or icon preview form], for painting
> different set of tools ... well those sets could have some
> intersections)

Do you use Blender? Real question, no tricks. :-)
Because we use Blender and I seriously don't agree on your conclusions 
that it handles the many feature better. It clearly has its features of 
predilection and other features which are not much maintained, 
hair-pulling or would really deserve some serious love, as you put it. 
Same as GIMP, actually. As I said, they are very alike.
It's simply very hard to maintain/improve everything equally on big 
powerful applications (though blender also has a lot more developers 
than we do).

Also I really love Blender too. I'm just saying that love should not 
blind you from existing shortcomings.
And even with the features which would deserve serious improvements, I 
am still happy they exist (like Blender VSE! Seriously it is 
hair-pulling in so many ways, yet I am happy it even exists, which is 
much better than nothing).

> > 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.
>
> OK that makes some sense.
>
> > 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.
>
> The "geek stuff" thing was more for some file loaders (and other
> functionality), that will be used by minority of people, than for
> animation.

Actually this is quite the opposite. It is clearly in GIMP's goal to be 
able to load every graphics format ever. Ideally we could load any 
format which has ever existed, in the best way possible (i.e. in a 
lossless way). This is a base expectation from people who want to work 
on images and can come accross various formats.

> About my comment about animation. Why would somebody make animation in
> Gimp when there are more suited apps for this task? Yes definitely
> some postproduction work on rendered frames ( as part of production
> pipeline) or simple GIF animation (there are some addons that helps

GIMP is very good for painting. This is the base of animation. I am 
talking of traditional (yet digital) animation here. Not vector or 3D, 
of course.
So yes, all it needs is the proper GUI to support an animator a bit more 
for all the animation part of the workflow.

Also for your information, back when we started, there was simply no 
other Free Software doing traditional animation while being stable and 
powerful. Since then some added some animation features (even Blender 
now is adding 2D animation!), some were freshly open-sourced 
(OpenToonz), etc. But we had already started back then, so we just 
continued.
Only issue with GIMP is that there are not enough core developers so I 
still devote a lot more time to core hacking (I'd love to be able to 
focus on my plug-in only, that would make its development a lot faster!) 
which makes GIMP motion quite slow to evolve. :-/

> with that and please leave it that way - as addon not as core
> functionality). But what profi animation could be possibly done in

As Alexandre said, the feature is implemented as a plug-in. :-)
This said, I would like that plug-ins had the ability to be better 
integrated into the core GUI of GIMP. This is one of the *many* things 
in my TODO list that I plan to work on some day.

> Gimp?!? Can you provide link or more info about profit animation you
> mentioned?

I just saw your other email, so now you know the answer 
(https://film.zemarmot.net/).
That was also in my signature. ;-)

In any case, I am happy to read that you appreciate ZeMarmot project.

> > > features (why Gimp needs this?)
> >
> > GIMP does not "need" anything. GIMP is not a person.
>
> You are wrong ;-) it needs love and care :-)

As I usually say, it is more that GIMP is made of people. And these 
people indeed need some love and care. ;-P

> > > 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?
>
> Well one thing is some random work (let's say request hunt - no
> problem with that) and other is core team coordinated work (to move
> Gimp closer to desired state)

GIMP is not a company. We discuss and agree on some base direction and 
features that we need, but in the end, there are no managers forcing us 
to work on a given project, with a deadline or anything. Obviously you 
can't force volunteers (unless you want to chase them away).
You like it or not, but that is the way GIMP development works. This 
also allows some more freedom since it is much less controlled. For 
instance when software are controlled by a company or a foundation, we 
all know the stories of a feature awaited by thousands of people that 
the controlling entity blocks for some unclear reason, sometimes even 
just political reasons.

GIMP development only strives at making the software better, and we 
would only refuse a new feature if it clearly makes existing (or maybe 
planned) features broken, slow or hard-to-use. We have no political or 
financial blockers.

Both development process have their pros and their cons.

> > someone needed this feature and made a feature request which stayed
> > in our bug tracker for about a year.
>
> This is another thing that interests me. Do you have some system how
> you choose what user request to implement  (let's say some polling
> system (wishlist) where users can get you some feedback about what
> needs to be done (priority)) or random dev picks something from
> Bugzilla (attention >>>BUG<<<zilla) and do it?

As I said, we cannot force developers or projects, so a priority system 
could be useful information yet would not actually mean that we'd 
implement some feature if no developers are willing to do the work.
People work on what they want to work.

Really when I say that GIMP is made of people (very cool people!), I 
mean it. :-)

Note that actually even when a project is controlled by a single entity, 
such a voting system does not guarantee anything either. Though when a 
feature request has a lot of votes, many people feel entitled to the 
feature (whereas — as I said — this entity can still refuse the feature 
even when third party patches are submitted). And sometimes it can 
backfire pretty bad because of this.

> > 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.
>
> There is no need for excuses. My questions were also little snappy and
> I wasn't probably clear enough.
>
> Have a nice day.

You too, have a nice week-end.

Jehan

> Michal
>
> >

--
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