Hi Geoffrey (and Carol, and yosh), Quoting Geoffrey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I must respectfully disagree, as a GIMP user, I am most definitely > interested in the reason for the change. It may be that I am a > developer as well, that prompts me to want to know, but the bottom line > is, any time a change is made that seems to be less intuitive (to me), > I'm going to wonder and inquire why the change was made.
As Sven pointed out, this has been addressed several times throughout this thread with external links. Perhaps if I summarise the history of the thing it will help. There have been problems with the GTK+ file selector since the 1.0 days. One of the big things people wanted to see changed for GNOME (and GTK+) 2.0 was the file selector. Since there was no agreement on what made up a good file selector, the old one stayed in, and since then it has been a stick with which other projects have beaten the GNOME crowd over the head with (including GTK+ apps which don't use the GNOME libraries, like the GIMP). So it was decided that it would definitely, definitely change in GTK+ 2.4, and at a certain moment it became clear that there was a "too many cooks" situation developing again. There were lots opf mock-ups, lots of Glade projects, lots of ideas for the new file chooser, but no interface expert directing the effort. A decision was made by the GTK+ developers to assign ownership of the design for the file selector (now known as the file chooser) to one person, Seth Nickell. He took advice from many people, but in the end, the ownership of the design was his. The GTK+ developers agreed to implement his design in all its glory without letting their opinions on it interfere. So we now have a new file chooser. There is a person responsible for it, and if you convince him that something is a good idea for it, he will modify his design to include it. If you fail, then your change will not be included. There is still the old crummy file selector, if you wish to use it. The new one is better. Anyone depending on GTK+ 2.4 and not using the new one by choice is probably a bit mad. Of course, it's entirely possible that they haven't gotten round to migrating it yet, but the presence of the old file selector in any GNOME 2.8 application is considered a bug. This is a measure of how big an improvement the new one is. Please note that several of the GTK+ developers implemented stuff they didn't agree with themselves, which is a sign of huge progress in interface design in free software. So - in resum�: 1. The GIMP uses the new file chooser because it is better than the old one. Not perfect, but much, much better. 2. If you (or anyone else) would like to see changes made to the file chooser, then there is one person you need to convince. That person is reachable via the GtkFileChooser module of the GTK+ product in bugzilla. 3. There are no plans to fork the GtkFileChooser to have a special copy of it with a wishlist of stuff from GIMP users in the GIMP. 4. That means that if you want to get the file chooser changed in the GIMP, you should engage (positively) the GTK+ developers and designers, and the GIMP user list is a most inappropriate place to do that. That is quite simply because 99% of the people involved don't read this list. I hope this clears up the issue. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Lyon, France _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
