GIMP 2.8 May Not Come Until Late November

GIMP 2.7.2 was released last week as a development stop in the road to GIMP 2.8, which itself was supposed to be released last December. But with the single-window user-interface lagging behind along with other work, GIMP 2.8 development dragged along with its limited number of core developers. It looked like it would just be a few more months until 2.8 was released, but with v2.7.2 just arriving, that's not likely to happen. Based upon a new tool developed by one of the GIMP developers, the 2.8 release isn't estimated to occur until the end of November.

Martin Nordholts, a software engineer at Sony Ericsson by day and GIMP / GEGL engineer by night, has been working to predict the GIMP 2.8 release. Martin's one of the most active GIMP contributors and wanted a way to estimate a GIMP 2.8 release date based upon outstanding work. The GIMP 2.8 release date matters for end-users, book publishers, translators, developers, distribution vendors, etc.

He wanted a tool that would provide a public web-page that would provide a graphic visualization of outstanding work and would be easy to maintain. Martin didn't find such a tool in existence so he created one for the GIMP project and others, it's called TaskTaste.com. He's written about it on his blog.

TaskTaste is tagged as a "simple and transparent planning and tracking of projects." It's licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and provides a means of estimating a target release date based upon outstanding bugs/work and estimating the time to correct each item.

In the case of the GIMP 2.8 Task Taste tracker, the release date is set for 25 November 2011. This date is based upon the size of all outstanding tasks (bugs) for GIMP 2.8 by using their bug tracker. That's nearly one year past the original slated release date for this major update to GIMP. Of course, the release date is subject to change and will hopefully end up being sooner.