Re: [Gimp-developer] Fedback and personal comments about Gimp 2.8

[Vincent Cadet <v_cadet yahoo fr>]

Thank you very much for taking the time, Alexia.

I mixed both your comments in my reply here.


> De: Alexia Death <alexiadeath gmail com>

> Its long and it's late here, so sorry for reading it only for the bits
> that caught my eye. The issues with dynamics editing  are known. All
> resources suffer from this, even tho its most obvious only with
> dynamics and vector brushes. However we could not postpone 2.8 further
> to fix this. The resources system as a whole is in need of some
> rethink and change.

So I know you're aware of the issue. Fair enough. Gimp 2.6 ease of should IMHO be used as a reference, i;e. make 2.8 as straightforward.


> As to your current predicament, how I work with
> dynamics is having a small number of "My" dynamics presets for
> tweaking purposes and a bunch of tool presets that make use of them in
> sensible manner. These provide a kind of "type brush" functionality I
> can customize on the fly... I know it's a workaround, but ...

Yes, "but", precisely :D .


> Making all dynamics writeable is within your own power.

Nice tip indeed. But as you clearly noticed, my concern is not about having the control rather than _the number of additional steps to gain control again_; Gimp 2.6: zero, Gimp 2.8: at least one or one for every preset.


> Its a simple task of copying the resources over from the system folder
> to your own profile and removing the system folder.

But why wouldn't Gimp do this automatically then? Keep system presets, read-only, in /usr/share and copy in the user's profile as soon as she changes resource in the GUI, sort of a Copy-on-Write[-when-source-is-read-only] algorithm? Many systems implement or revolve around such a feature: Logical Volume Manager's snapshot mechanism, Kernel Samepage Merging, Qemu QCOW2 disk format...

This would avoid having to disable the whole resource in the GUI and would make every one of them editable again. And it also would allow a soft "reset" for settings by deleting the appropriate file from the user's profile. Simple and neat.


> >III.1. Tablet-specifics, Pen/Eraser consistency
> > First thing I noticed in 2.8 is that I now need to select the eraser
> > tool when I flip my pen to use the eraser. I didn't have to do that
> > in 2.6.

> Your tablet is not recognized or set up right then. On gimp side, if
> pen and eraser are reported as separate devices, they can have
> separate tools. Just tested it on my system(linux, wacom tablet) It
> works.

Uh, no, that's not what I meant in fact. I might have forgotten to mention "Whenever I start Gimp" -- I have to assign the eraser tool to the stylus' eraser. So when I start Gimp, the stylus Eraser is always assigned, like, the airbrush IIRC. So I need to change it everytime I start Gimp. And the setting is lost when I close it. But both the pen and eraser are recognized and used separately and independently... except for the brush size as I described, below.


> > So whenever I flip my pen and use the eraser, change the brush
> > size, flip it again, have to restore the paint size again...! This is
> > getting obnoxious, really.

> This is a side-effect of fixing another much more annoying issue -
> brush size/shape changing when switching tools. Another thing that
> there was no time to fix properly before 2.8. So we fixed the big
> annoyance, and left the tablets as they were.

So I know you're aware of this, too. I just hope these known issues will be solved early enough.


> You can use tool presets to work around this one.

I have no idea how to do that, only as of now I've become slightly allergic to... presets :D .


> > III.3. Tablet-specifics, dialogs and menus
> 
> > A bug, which was present in 2.6 and is still not totally fixed in 2.8:
> > using menus with the stylus sometimes (in 2.6 it happened all the time)
> > makes dialogs unusable.

> This one is a known GTK2 bug that WONT be fixed. It will go away when
> gimp finally gets migrated to GTK3.

Okay. What can I say then... Can't wait :/ .

Cheers,
Vince C.