New “mypaint-brushes” package

Since January 1st, GIMP depends on the “mypaint-brushes” repository which I am maintaining until MyPaint project finally takes it alongside its other repositories.

I am hoping that I won’t have to maintain this for long and am looking forward for the MyPaint developers to take care of it (and last I heard of it, in the bug report, they wanted to). So this blog post is also to say that I am not trying to fork MyPaint or anything. 😛 I am just taking a little advance because we cannot wait much longer unfortunately since GIMP now uses libmypaint and we are really looking into releasing GIMP 2.10 as soon as we can. Therefore we need to have MyPaint brushes as their own separate package, which will allow:

• Not having MyPaint as a de-facto dependency of GIMP since brushes are currently part of MyPaint itself (not separate) and our new MyPaint brush tool in GIMP is basically useless without the brushes.
• We can now check the existence and path of the brushes at build time (through pkg-config), instead of guessing, making sure GIMP will have brushes to work with.
• The libmypaint library has been recently versionned because of changes in its API (current libmypaint repository’s master branch is the future version 2). Since libmypaint 2 has no release yet, GIMP uses libmypaint 1 (and likely still will when we will release).
  Similarly the mypaint-brushes package I created is also versionned because the brush format has evolved with the API. It has new settings and new inputs, which were crashing older libmypaint. New settings crashes have been fixed, but the new input crashes still exist to this day. Obviously this is not good and we cannot afford GIMP to crash when using newer brushes. So we need versionned brushes.
• Even if the crashes were all fixed, some brush settings changed their behavior/meaning (for instance the computation of the speed). That means basically that the brush format changed in a non-compatible way. Another reason to version brushes.

So that’s a new package out there, but an important one and any distribution out there which wishes to package GIMP will also have to package it.

Also if other projects use libmypaint, I would suggest you also depend on mypaint-brushes (as should MyPaint itself actually). 🙂

P.S.: of course, this does not fix the custom brushes that someone would import from MyPaint to GIMP, but at least we’ll have good default brushes.

P.P.S.: if you build yourself the development version of GIMP, check out the INSTALL file carefully. In particular, you don’t want to install the master branch (as I said above, master is version 2, we use version 1) and when installing in a non-standard prefix, make sure your PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable is properly set.

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Liberapay, Patreon or Tipeee through ZeMarmot project.