Last week, the core GIMP team has been meeting for Wilber Week, a week-long meeting to work on GIMP 2.10 release and discuss the future of GIMP.  The meeting place was an Art Residency in the countryside, ~50km from Barcelona, Spain, with pretty much nothing but an internet access and a fire place for heating. Of course, both Aryeom and I were part of this hacking week. I personally think this has been a very exciting and productive time. Here is our personal report (it does not include the full result for everyone, only the part we have been a part of).

Software Hacking, by Jehan

GIMP on Flatpak

I’ve wanted to work on an official Flatpak build for at least 6 months, did some early tests already back in September, but could finally make the full time only this week. The build is feature-complete (this was not the case of the original nightly builds of GIMP, used as tests by Flatpak’s main developer, back when it was still called xdg-app; also these incomplete builds seem to have not been available anymore for a few months now), or nearly (since some features are still missing in Flatpak).

I’ll talk more on this later in a dedicated post, detailing what is there or not, and why, with feedback on the Flatpak project.
Bottom line: GIMP will have an official Flatpak, at least starting GIMP 2.10!

Working on the help system, Windows build, and more…

I’ve also worked in parallel on some other topics. For instance I’ve made a new Windows build of GIMP to test a few bugs (with my cross-build tool, crossroad, which I hadn’t used for a few months!), fixed a few bugs here and there, and also spent a good amount of time working on improving language detection for the help system (in particular some broken cases when you don’t have exactly the same interface language as the help you downloaded, since we don’t have documentations for as many languages as we have GUI translations). This part is mostly not merged in our code yet because unfinished. But it should be soon.
All in all, that was 26 commits in GIMP (and 1 minor commit in babl) last week, and a lot more things started.

Art hacking, by Aryeom

Aryeom, ZeMarmot director, contributed a lot of smiles (as always), art and design. Since Mitch forgot our usual “Wilber Flag”, she quickly scribbled one on a big sheet of paper (see in video).

Apart from playing with Wilber stamps, created by Antenne Springborn, Aryeom also spent many hours discussing t-shirt and patch designs with Simon Budig. Here is one of her nice attempts for a very classy outlined-Wilber design:

Funny story: she chose as a base a font called montserrat, without realizing that the region we were in at the time was called Montserrat as well. Total coincidence!

She has also been working on some missing icons in GIMP, for instance the Import/Export preferences icon.

And with time permitting, she scribbled various drawings on paper, because digital painting doesn’t mean you should forget analog techniques, right?

Social hacking: interviews and merchandise

Developer interviews

I have been wanting to bring a little more life to our communication ever since we got a new website for GIMP. We already produce more regular news. I wish we had even more. I also think we should even extend to community news. So if you’ve got cool events around the world involving GIMP, do not hesitate to tell us about them. We may be able to make it a gimp.org news when time permits.

Something else I wanted is showing the people behind GIMP: developers and contributors, but even the artists, designers and other creators making usage of GIMP as a tool in their daily creative process. I have talked about these interviews for a few months now, and Wilber Week was my first attempt to make them a reality. I interviewed Mitch, GIMP maintainer, Pippin, GEGL maintainer, Schumaml, GIMP administrator, Simon, a very early GIMP developer and Rishi, GNOME Photos maintainer and GEGL contributor.
All these interviews soon to be featured on gimp.org!

And that’s only a start! I am planning on interviewing even more contributors (developers and non-developers) and also artists. 🙂

Merchandising

We regularly have requests about t-shirts or other merchandising featuring Wilber/GIMP. So we sat down and discussed on what should be exactly GIMP’s official position on this topic. As you know, I, personally, am all for Libre Art, so this was my stance. And I am happy that we are currently willing to be quite liberal.

Yet we have a lot of values and that was our main concern: how nice is your design? Is your merchandising using good material? Is it produced with ecologically-conscious techniques? Do you give back to the community?… So many questions and this is why Simon Budig will work on a ruleset of what will be acceptable GIMP merchandising that we will “endorse”. Endorsement from the GIMP project will mean that we will feature your selling page link on gimp.org and also that you will be allowed to feature on your own page some “endorsed by GIMP” text or logo. I’ve been quite inspired by this system which Nina Paley uses for Sita Sings the Blues movie.

Well that’s the current status, but don’t take it as an official position and wait for an official news or page on gimp.org (as a general rule, nothing I write is in any way an official GIMP statement unless confirmed on the main website by text validated by peers).

Release hacking!

The one you’ve all been waiting for, so I kept it for the end, or close: what about GIMP 2.10 release? We finally decided that it is time to get 2.10 going. We still have a few things that we absolutely need to fix before the release, but the main decision is that we should stop being blocked by unfinished cool features.

We have got many very awesome features which are “nearly there”, but mostly untouched for years. Usually it means that it globally works but is either extremely slow (like the Seamless Clone or n-point deformation tools), or that it is much too instable (up to the crash), often also with unfinished GUI…
Well we will have to do a pass through our feature list and will simply disable whatever is deemed non-releasable. The code will still be here for anyone to fix, but we just can’t release half-finished unstable features. Sorry.
The good news is that it suddenly divides our blocker list by 10 or so! And that should make GIMP 2.10 coming along pretty soon.

But so what of all these cool features? Will we have to wait until GIMP 3 now? Not necessarily! We decided to relax the release rules, which come from a time where all free software released major versions with new features and minor versions with bug fixes only (some kind of semantic versioning applied to end software). So now, if any cool new feature comes along or if the currently deactivated features get finished, we are willing to make minor releases with them! Yes you read it well. This makes it much more exciting for developers since it means you won’t have to wait for years to see your changes in GIMP. But it also means that our contribution process gets much more robust to the unfinished-patch-dropping issue. Of course the libgimp API (used by plugins) still stays stable. Changes does not mean breaking stability!
This was also summed-up in an official gimp.org news recently.

I am so happy about this because I have been pushing for this change in our release process for years. Actually the first time I proposed this was in Libre Graphics Meeting 2014, Leipzig (as I explained in my report back then). I call it a rolling release, where we can release very regularly new stuff, even if just a little. This time though, the topic was brought up by Mitch himself.

People hacking

The conclusion of this week is that it was very nice. As Simon Budig put it in his interview: I mostly stay for the people. I think this is the same for us, and these kind of social events are the proof of it. The GIMP project is ­ — before all — made of people, and not just any people, even nice people! Such event is a good occasion for meeting physically, from time to time, and not just with pixels and bits exchanged through the internet.
We also spent a few hours visiting Barcelona, in particular Sagrada Familia, and doing a few hikes in Montserrat.

Financial hacking: ZeMarmot

As a conclusion, we remind you that ZeMarmot would be the way for me to work full-time on GIMP software development! We could do nearly as much every week if our project had the funding which allowed us to sustain ourselves while hacking Free Software. So if you wish to see GIMP be released faster with many cool features, don’t hesitate to click our Patreon links (for USD funding) or the Tipeee one (EUR funding).

See you soon!