Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of January, 31st, 2017

[Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se>]

Hey,

On Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 06:34:36PM -0800, Cosimo Cecchi wrote:
> = Foundation Board Minutes for Tue, January 31st 2017, 18:00 UTC =
>
> [...]
>
>  * From the mailing list - patreon campaign
>   * We're going to have an ED, it's going to cost us for a bit until they
> can bring in money. We should be conservative in the meantime.
>   * The campaigns are not very well framed, it is unclear what they would
> be working on.
>   * ACTION: Allan to encourage the engagement team to promote the campaigns
>   * ACTION: Allan to reach out to Lapo saying we're keeping an eye on it
>   * ACTION: Nuritzi to ask Neil for his opinion

I was waiting for a wider or more prominent discussion about this with
more context, but I haven't seen anything. I also don't know if Lapo
was able to clarify the framing of the comapigns. I'd surprised if he
didn't. :)

So, anyway, since I am not on board-list gnome org and can't access
the archives, I'll bite based on some wild assumptions. Hopefully,
it will help.

I assume that by "campaigns" we are talking about pippin and Tanu's
campaigns:
  * https://www.patreon.com/pippin
  * https://www.patreon.com/tanuk

Tanu's campaign is about Pulseaudio, something that I use daily but
know next to nothing about. So I will just comment on the other
one. ie., pippin's campaign.

It is not clear to me why you consider it to be "not very well
framed"?  Is it about the introductory wording on
https://www.patreon.com/pippin?

pippin (ie. Oyvind Kolas) is one of the two most prolific contributors
to the GIMP/GEGL/Babl stack (mitch being the other one). As far as I
understand, the Patreon campaign is meant to enable him to focus more
on that work and still afford a living.

GEGL/Babl is the image processing toolkit that lets GIMP 2.9.x/2.10
support more than 8-bits per colour channel [1]. ie., more than 256
levels for red, green and blue blue in a pixel. Going forward it will
enable GIMP to be a non-destructive editor. These are all very
important and major milestones for GIMP if it has to stay relevant in
this day and age.

On a more personal and less prominent front, GEGL/Babl is one of the
core dependencies of GNOME Photos. We use it for everything from
decoding and loading image files to memory, for all our
non-destructive editing, for rendering it on the screen, and for
thumbnailing.

So, GEGL/Babl is relevant to GIMP and by extension to GNOME and we
will all be better off it was strongly maintained.

Regarding what the Patreon campaign has yielded so far ...

Ever since pippin started devoting more time to this, I have noticed a
distinct uptick in patch reviews and a general tightening of all
feedback loops. As a GEGL contributor, I find this very
encouraging. As a GEGL user who is on a much shorter development cycle
than GIMP, this is very helpful. I can expect releases to show up
whenever I need them to.

Moving on to more eye-catching things. You can see some highlights on
https://www.patreon.com/pippin itself. However, those can be hard to
parse for the casual onlooker, so I'll try to summarise.

Babl's performance has benefitted from a new persistent cache. That
benefits all conversions from sRGB to linear RGB to CIE Lab and so on.
See https://www.patreon.com/posts/8bpc-jpg-images-7894246

A ton of work on MIP mapping. It was lying unfinished for years, and is
now in a state that applications can actually think of using it. For the
uninitiated, MIP maps enable massive performance gains by reducing the
amount of pixel data that needs to processed during interactive editing
of images. See https://www.patreon.com/posts/mipmaps-now-at-8143154 and
https://www.patreon.com/posts/gegl-mipmap-8436181

It has also yielded the odd funky image processing operation. See
https://www.patreon.com/posts/spachrotyzer-8554146 and
https://pippin.gimp.org/spachrotyzer/

The GIMP community has already backed this:
https://www.gimp.org/news/2017/01/16/pippin-patreon-fundraising-started/

I hope GNOME will do so too.

Cheers,
Rishi

[1] https://www.gimp.org/news/2015/11/27/gimp-2-9-2-released/