Re: [Gimp-user] Official binaries for Windows and MacOS X

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 12:33 AM, Mikael Ståldal wrote:
> On the official GIMP homepage, you can read:
>
> "The GIMP team doesn't provide official Mac binaries."
>
> and
>
> "The GIMP team doesn't officially provide any Windows binaries."
>
> I think that the GIMP team should provide official binaries for Windows and
> MacOS X.

Hi Mikael,

I'm afraid you are missing an essential bit of information. Let me provide it :)

Official support means that the team takes responsibility for how well
GIMP works on those platforms and thus can be blamed for anything that
is wrong there. Which means that someone in the core team should use
this platform as a primary one and be ready to fix things for it.

As far as I can tell the we don't have core team developers actively
working on Windows (although some fixes do get applied to fix bugs on
Windows). TBH, not so long ago the team was even discussing
possibility to call Windows platform unsupported until the switch to
GTK 3 due to a number of horrible bugs in advanced input devices
support in GTK+ 2 which noone's going to fix. I'm not speaking on
behalf of the rest of the team, but I can't see the point of providing
a half-working solution for painters and calling it an official
Windows build. Sorry.

There _are_ some changes coming to Quartz port of GTK+ lately to make
GIMP look and behave more natively on Mac, but I'm not sure that at
this point we can call this platform officially supported (especially
since we don't package DMGs).

> This doesn't need to involve much work, perhaps you can get away with just
> change the text on the homepage and declare the Windows and MacOS X packages
> you already link to as official.

I don't think we can get away with just that. We really do not provide
binaries. It's a (much appreciated) 3rd party effort. OTOH, I do see
your point, and hopefully at some point we'll get there.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org