Hello planet GNOME!

As a GNOME foundation member, I (Jehan) got this log subscribed to planet GNOME a few days ago. So I figured I might as well make a small “hello” message to present myself. 🙂

I am mostly here as a GIMP developer. For full disclosure, though I regularly use GNOME 2, I never “really” used GNOME 3 (I actually really want to try it but my current distribution is not very GNOME 3-friendly unfortunately). Also I regularly change desktops and window managers anyway.
My main contributions to GNOME projects, other than GIMP itself, are related to me hacking on GIMP.

If I have to cite my patch on GTK+ I am the happiest about, it is probably one most people will never hear about nor notice, since it is GTK+ 2-only. But still I want to believe it changed the life of many GIMP or MyPaint users! Indeed with no hotplug available before GTK+ 3, when unplugging a graphic tablet, a GTK+ 2 application was crashing! Since MyPaint and GIMP are used by a lot of people drawing with a tablet, this was a very very embarrassing and silly issue, also very bad (crash means data loss, and hand-drawn data is usually not perfectly reproducible). Since waiting for the switch to GTK+ 3 (an ongoing process but due in 2 major GIMP releases!) was not a suitable option to me, I worked around the bug, and at least GTK+ does not crash anymore.
When we started using Exiv2 through GExiv2, I helped their migration to autotools, allowing the project to be easily cross-compiled, which soon became a project under GNOME umbrella itself.
I have also various patches in babl, GEGL, pango, and other non-GNOME project like fontconfig, gettext or even autoconf itself, all of these contributions as a consequence of me hacking on GIMP.
Finally I have quite a list of bug fixes and features on GIMP itself of course, but I won’t list them all here.

For more details about various of my contributions to Free Software, and not only GIMP-related, this OpenHub page about myself is not exhaustive but gives a good overview.

In the end, I hack on software not only because I like this, but also because I need these as a user, or for other users, and I prefer to do things by myself rather than wait for someone else doing these when this is important to me. Therefore why I initially started hacking on GIMP was to help Aryeom, and now we are able together to start our project of a film animation fully with Free Software.
I still remember that the first times that I showed GIMP to Aryeom, it would crash for no good reason (for instance because the USB cable of her tablet would sometimes be loose and unplug for a hundredth of second, yet enough time for an X error to occur and crash GTK+, as explained above). So I was so happy when I could fix this crash and other instabilities. Obviously I am far from alone. Mitch in particular, GIMP maintainer, still does 100 times what I do, and without him, GIMP would not be where it is now. I am quite happy to bring my little stone to build this huge and wonderful bazaar which is GIMP, and I sure hope I will be able to continue to do so for years and years!

Finally I’ll conclude by writing about our project of animation film, since I think it could be a major cogwheel to my world domination plan! ZeMarmot could be the first 2D animation film made fully with Free Software and released as Creative Commons BY-SA. I don’t believe it to be an easy goal, but I am helped with Aryeom, a very skilled animation artist, AMMD, a collective of very good Libre Art musicians, other artists, developers, Free Software or Libre Art supporters, and a lot of friends who want to see it happen too. So let’s get it realized!

And that’s it, for who I am! At least a little part of who I am, since as anybody else, how can you sum a person up in one blog post?! But enough to hope I get you interested.
Hello world planet GNOME!