GIMP's Future With 2.8, Then Going Forward With GEGL

At the end of December we talked about GIMP 2.8 struggling to make it out the door and now there's official commentary from the GIMP project.

In last month's article we talked about how this free software graphics program missed its anticipated release date and one of the core developers, Martin Nordholts, said it was about a month and a half away still if it's just a single developer working on the release full-time. Martin said the key item missing from GIMP 2.8 was the single-window interface mode and that there were less than three dedicated developers working on this critical free software project.

In today's announcement found on GIMP.org it's said that the two big obstacles blocking the v2.8 release is the user-interface work along with broken graphic tablets support in GTK+. "We treasure your continuous support for the project and thus we are determined to release v2.8 only when it's working out of box as expected for everybody."

Once GIMP 2.8 does make it out the door, the announcement goes on to say that they will focus GIMP's development upon deep integration with GEGL, which is their new image processing core. With GIMP 2.6, many image processing tasks were ported to GEGL, but by default GIMP was still using the legacy 8-bt code paths unless manually enabling GEGL. More information on the Generic Graphics Library can be found at GEGL.org.