GIMP Picks Up Better Debugging Support, Backtrace GUI

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GIMP Picks Up Better Debugging Support, Backtrace GUI

Adding to the list of features for the long overdue GIMP 2.10 release is better debugging support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GIMP-Gets-Backtrace-GUI

[thecursedfly]

If only they would adopt shorter release cycles... last two releases, 2.6 and 2.8 were released in 2008 and 1012, two in TEN years (and counting)! This way people stop caring of the upcoming hypotetical features since they cannot expect to see them anytime soon, kills any enthusiasm. Imo it's GIMP's biggest issue.

[pal666]

there is a tool for system-wide crash reporting - abrtd, gimp devs should work on something useful for drawing instead

[gnarlin]

Now with GTK4 on the horizon I'm betting that GTK4 will be out before Gimp finishes it's GTK3 port :-/

[hyperchaotic]

If only they would adopt shorter release cycles... last two releases, 2.6 and 2.8 were released in 2008 and 1012, two in TEN years (and counting)! This way people stop caring of the upcoming hypotetical features since they cannot expect to see them anytime soon, kills any enthusiasm. Imo it's GIMP's biggest issue.

This have been brought up many times. The thing is that in order to support modern features (high bit depth, non destructive editing, parallel processing/OpenCL, etc.) the entire backend had to be rewritten, part of which have been done in a separate project (GEGL). This was a monumental task and both projects have precious few active developers so it took a long time, but was necessary. 2.10 might seem like a minor release but it is huge because of the new backend.

After that, releases could potentially be more frequent.

[unixfan2001]

there is a tool for system-wide crash reporting - abrtd, gimp devs should work on something useful for drawing instead

abrtd is GNU/Linux specific. GIMP is a multiplatform application.

[pal666]

abrtd is GNU/Linux specific. GIMP is a multiplatform application.

other platforms are free to implement their own crash reporters. in fact they do already.
gimp risks to contract xorg disease

[oiaohm]

other platforms are free to implement their own crash reporters. in fact they do already.
gimp risks to contract xorg disease

http://anzwix.com/a/GIMP/App:%20Make...k%20On%20Win32.
Yes the backtrace GUI for gimp is in fact platform neutral.

None of the generic crash reporters suit stuff like gimp and you really need to get a clue on this point.

Something you have not considered is the gimp plugin system.

https://developer.gimp.org/writing-a-plug-in/1/

Yes you write plugins in C. So the complete program crashing evil nasty ways that abrtd might get informed about might have nothing to-do with the gimp code base at all it might be a third party plugin throwing the problem.

abrtd is not that much use with applications that take native code plugins from third parties all it end up doing in spamming you with stuff that is not your code bases problem.

Reality is most crash reporters that are provide by platforms purely presume that you will not have third party binary plugins. The Linux kernel shows the feature that is required. Its call a tainted flag. So that the crash reporting can know that the program was running with a third party part loaded. Yes asking users to run without third party plugins and see if they can replicate the issue before sending it upstream in case crash while tainted can be really good thing. Also providing a straight up ability to look at back-trace some case a person using a custom plugin can know its their code.

[unixfan2001]

other platforms are free to implement their own crash reporters. in fact they do already.
gimp risks to contract xorg disease

BS!

As an end-user software developer, the last thing you want is having to write shims for every platform's crash reporting/debugging in existence.
A universal crash reporter is a sane choice and doesn't magically turn GIMP into a monolithic behemoth.