While we are ending 2021, let’s sum up the year. For my first year as co-maintainer, I thought it would be a good idea to write this report in my name so that I can give personal impressions of how it is to work on GIMP and what it means to me.
In 2021, we had:
gimp.org, i.e. right here) by 14 contributors.gimp-help (our manual), whose main contributor is
Jacob Boerema who is doing an awesome work reviving it.gimp-macos-build (our repository for the macOS build)
by 4 contributors (mostly by Lukas Oberhuber who took over
maintainance of the macOS package).In the end, that’s quite a lot of work proudly brought to you by GIMP. As you may notice, we have quite some contributions, yet the core work is still actually done by a handful of people as most contributions are one-off (out of the 91 contributors, 69 contributed less than 10 commits, and among these 51 contributed a single commit).
I want to commend Jacob Boerema in particular who is the biggest contributor this year on the stable branch, while I must admit I mostly focus on the development branch and sometimes tend to neglect a bit the stable branch 😒! Thanks Jacob! 🤗
And we should never forget babl, GEGL and the new project ctx by
Øyvind Kolås as these constitute the core of GIMP imaging engine and are
considered as much a part of GIMP project as the interface itself.
You might have noticed a regular section for the last few news titled “Team news” where we list changes in the team, in particular new contributors who are given more access to the tracker or the source repository. I have been trying to be more and more proactive into integrating people into the core team.
Indeed as you saw in the statistics, Jacob Boerema is the only other contributor who did more than 100 commits in 2021, while I did a bit over 500. So I want to improve this ratio and increase the bus factor.
GIMP team has always been very welcoming, at least ever since I started contributing, back in 2012 and this is even why I stayed back then. I want to perpetuate this tradition. My goal is to identify faster the people to give more responsibility to (note that technical skills are important but social skills — in other words being a good person and nice to others — is my priority checkbox). Well it’s definitely an evil trick 🦹 to lessen my own burden, but I also expect this to make it way more fun 🎡 contributing to the project (based on personal experience)!
Therefore let me give special props to Jacob Boerema for his tireless work on file format support and more, Niels de Graef for his invaluable help and good expertise with GTK, Luca Bacci for his very nice work on input device support, helping on Windows and his GTK expertise, Daniel Novomesky for making HEIF/AVIF and JPEG-XL first-class formats…
Let’s not forget recurring contributors such as Massimo Valentini, Lloyd Konneker… (what would we do without these people never giving up on GIMP, years after years?!) and promising newcomers like Stanislav Grinkov.
Now let’s applaud our packagers: Jernej Simončič has been around in GIMP
for as long as I could remember, flawlessly making Windows installers
like a solid rock to rely on; macOS history is bumpier yet Lukas
Oberhuber has been doing an outstanding work lately so I sure hope he’ll
stay around; on Flatpak side, Hubert Figuière helps quite a lot too (and
I secretly 🤫 hope he will end up taking over me maintaining our
stable, beta and nightly flatpak-s!).
At the end of the day, GIMP is much bigger than just developers, it’s a community. What would we do without people helping for the website, bug triaging, infrastructure and more? And let’s not forget the translators, so many of them! I just love all of you! Sorry that I cannot just name everyone (in case I forgot you, don’t take it the wrong way, there are just so many awesome people around!).
What I like to tell everyone is that GIMP is both a community software and Free Software, or simply a Community, Free Software. This double concept is extremely important to me and this is why I love GIMP and why both Aryeom and I (from ZeMarmot projet, from which our heavy-lifting contributions really started) stuck with it. This is about humans meeting each others and trying to do something nice together (even though each’s personal end goal might be different). Everything works wonderfully as long as we remember to be good to each other. 🤗
Therefore to all contributors (of any specialties) who helped GIMP so far, I want to say a huge thank you! GIMP is what it is thanks to you! 🙏
With 4 development versions released already, you know that we are working very hard on the future: GIMP 3.0.
Some features took a lot of time, mostly when we changed core logics. I am thinking in particular about the code for multi-selection of layers. It’s not that selecting multiple items in a list is hard to implement, it’s that any feature in the whole application has been forever expecting just one layer or one channel selected. So what happens when there are 2, 3 or any number of items selected? Every feature, every tool, every plug-in and filter has to be rethought for this new use case. This is a huge work and it has been 2 years I have been on and off on this one in between porting or developing other code and reviewing contributors’ code. Fortunately this change is nearing the end lately (not completely finished though). So that’s a great progress.
By the way, a part of this work has been to get rid of the “link” (chain
⛓ icon in the Layers dockable) concept in favor of multi-selection
(and layer search and storage as a replacement concept for the ability
to save layer links). This part is also done now. I’ll talk more about
this in the GIMP 2.99.10 release news.
Among other blockers which I listed a year ago, we are steadily progressing on our GTK3 port and Wayland support as well as stabilizing the plug-in API. I do hope these will be considered in a good enough state soon enough so that we can consider having a release candidate.
On the other hand, the space invasion has been a bit on the slow pace in 2021 so this is definitely one topic we need to get back full-on very soon. Same for the extension platform.
The core 🫀⚙️ of modern GIMP is GEGL, a library project nearly as old as GIMP itself, by the same core of people, even though the first tentative integrations only happened in GIMP 2.6, and since then slowly making its way to be the main engine behind most pixel manipulation in the software.
GEGL development has been slowing down a bit since 2019, but mostly
because it is becoming stabler by the day, which is really when things
are getting good, solid and interesting.
Now it would still be unfair to forget talking about the recent support
of the CMYK color model in GEGL, which means we are a step closer to
get some support in GIMP itself.
Another exciting thing is the new project Øyvind Kolås has been working on these days: ctx, a vector graphics library.
Now I know it may not sound as useful when you develop a raster graphics
application, but there are still a lot of intersecting topics. One of
these topics is the graphics interface itself which is usually rendered
out of vector primitives. In GTK case, the rendering is going through
Cairo. Øyvind has been working a lot to both render nicer and
faster than
Cairo, or similarly, on many cases. ctx also has color-management
thought into the framework from the ground up as a first-class citizen.
Of course ctx is still heavily under work as can be seen by the
intense commit rate so we’ll have to see where it goes, but this is for
sure exciting since Øyvind is a well-proven excellent R&D developer.
There are other areas where ctx is useful, such as the few GEGL
operations with vector components which have already been ported to this
new library (e.g. gegl:fill-path) and text itself is usually rendered
through vector shapes (so who knows what might happen when we improve
text support?). GIMP is not going to refocus on vector graphics anytime
soon, but we may definitely get more vector-related features as we go
(anyone who follow a bit ZeMarmot‘s work knows that we are really
looking into improved ways for SVG integration for instance, such
as in my early, not merged yet, link layer
experiment).
When we do more vector work, ctx will definitely be a top contender.
I can already hear Øyvind telling me that ctx is actually much more
than these few areas I summed up here. So let me be sorry in advance,
Øyvind! This is why this report is in my name, taking into account my
own limitations in understanding your bigger plans, and looking forward
to be pleasantly surprised and amazed in the future! 🤯
In all software projects, there is a constant which is mostly invisible, yet extremely important: infrastructure.
You might have noticed we did speak a bit more than usual about this in 2021 because it has really been something which used to bother me in my early years contributing to GIMP. I always thought we needed more robust, automated and transparent builds (which is getting there for Windows, macOS and Linux with Flatpak), better download mirrors handling, better continuous integration in general, better end-user documentation (Jacob is on it! And we have plans to get a more automated release and online testing policy of GIMP manual, which should happen in 2022)…
We also had some work done in 2021 around developer documentation:
Akkana Peck (well known for having written
books on GIMP) and Lloyd Konneker helped set up some initial
documentation to port plug-ins and script from 2.10 to 3.0. Akkana also
jump-started generating API references for the Python and Javascript
bindings (with g-ir-doc-tool). Then very recently Niels De Graef
migrated our generic API documentation generation from gtk-doc to
gi-docgen, producing much more modern web documentation for plug-in
developers. None of these are online yet, only built within the source
repository for the time being. Getting an online update procedure for
these is also on the TODO list.
All these topics take a lot of time and are also necessary to get a much nicer experience using GIMP. So I am already quite proud of what we did in 2021 and really excited about our 2022 plans.
You might wonder now: when will GIMP 3.0 be released?
Nope sorry, as always, we don’t answer such question. 😛 What we can say is that we are hard at work for this to happen and for sure I’d like it to be earlier rather than later.
As said above, apart from the code itself, I also want us to get our new online manual infrastructure improved before the release, but also our extension framework ready as well as a brand new developer website with documentation and more. So the plans are actually quite extensive and it’s not only within GIMP code itself (though code definitely needs more work too). We’ll see how things go from here!
Don’t forget you can donate to the project and personally fund several GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. As you know, myself as maintainer of GIMP (through ZeMarmot project) and Øyvind as maintainer of GEGL are crowdfunding to be able to work full-time on free software. Any funding is appreciated to help us succeed in such endeavour.
I wish you all a nice new year eve and a wonderful year 2022. 🥳
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