Hi,
my EUR 0.02 to the plug-in discussion....
I don't think that internationalisation is our major problem with plug-ins
right now. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about it now, but our
main problem is the mass of plug-ins shipped with the Gimp.
The Filters menu is IMHO overcrowded. Even a redesign can't solve the fact
that it is really difficult to find the plug-in you need and most users will
only need a small subset of the included plugins. On the other hand there
quite a few nice plug-ins that are definitely worth to be included (if we go
along with our current philosophy to include each and every plug-in that
could come in handy). Antialias is one of those candidates just to bring up
an example.
One strength of Gimp definitely is that it comes with a huge amount of
filters and file-formats by default. But with the amount of plug-ins growing
constantly, we should IMHO discuss if we can continue like that.
I have for myself included a whole bunch of plug-ins to CVS in the last
months. This was done with the intention to have them tested by a wider
audience. It was never my intention to definitely have them all included in
the final 1.2 distribution. Now, what can we do about this? There are a few
solutions that I can imagine and I'm sure you can imagine more...
(1) Include only a few core plug-ins and package others into groups that the
user can install at will and that will stay in one menu place as a group.
This doesn't mean that no core plug-ins are part of the same menu, but by
installing this package, the user would customize the gimp for his special
needs by adding special functionality
For example this would like:
gimp-plugins-artistic (gimppressionist, mosaic, oilify, ...)
gimp-plugins-webdesign (imagemap, html, animoptimize, ...)
gimp-plugins-render-fractal (fractal-explorer, cml_explorer, ....)
gimp-plugins-fileformats (fits, sunras, ...)
gimp-plugins-perl
(you get the point)
For the hardcore user create a package that contains them all.
(2) Stay with the same basic plug-ins as in (1), rewrite the plug-in
registry, mirror it and include a nice tool that allows users to download and
install plug-ins when the need arises. Of course this would have to be
possible from within a running gimp and since I'm not sure if this would work
at all, this is possibly only a solution for 2.0.
(3) Let's test all those plug-ins heavily and drop everything that is not
stable or usable into gimp-plugins-unstable. Do the same thing with what is
called gimp-plugins-unstable now and move all plugins that seem to be stable
and usable up into the main distribution. Then start the menu discussion all
over (we had one before 1.0 was released) and find a better way to put all
those plug-ins into suitable menu positions.
Salut, Sven
