David,

Instead of spending all this time writing your views of the world, I am sure that all on this list including you would actually think the time would be better spend actually implementing mng support for gimp.

I suggest that you go about it in the following steps:

1. Extract the png plug-in file and rename in mng. 2. Change it so that it registers the .mng extension. 3. Make sure that it compiles and that it is may be used to read png files that have been renamed ".mng". 4. Get and compile the libmng library from http://www.libmng.com/ . 5. Get some mng example files.
6. Study the libmng example programs and try to implement the same scenario for getting the data into the mng plugin. At first, decide about some minimal subset of mng that you will support, e.g. one-layer that are not JNG. (This is essentially the same thing as png).
7. After succeeding in reading one-layer non-jng mng images, add support for multi-layer and mng. 8. Release and get the well deserved glory. 9. Add mng write support.
10. Release again and get more glory. 8-)
Btw, is there tutorial available for image loader and writer plug-ins?

Regards, Dov

On Thu, Nov 28, 2002 at 08:50:51PM -0500, David Weeks wrote:

Jeez,

Guys, perhaps it was wrong for me to do the French/American thing, but I was drawing on historical examples. All the same, I'd not respect anyone who didn't respect their own country. I LOVE America, as an American, and I have MAJOR problems with much of America, just the same.

Tolerance isn't the lack of criticism, and intolerance isn't the act of criticism, and beyond that, some things are tolerable, and some things are not. So let's drop the "troll" "intolerant" "ignorant" crap and deal with information. These reactions are human nature, and responsible for the strife in the world; just look at this list.

Free discusion of ideas means it's all good, even the bad and the ugly, cause that bad and ugly might be the fact that we're wrong, and someone was rude in pointing it out.

My problem of recent days started with a reply to a requested feature: mng support. The response I got was that I had a lot of nerve asking someone else to slave for me. I got that from the same who's never even HEARD of regular expressions, and is now an active partner in the development of gimp? Red flag folks. I also see a split between Film Gimp and gimp. More flags of red. And there the fact that very POWERFUL people don't like us. We don't serve them, we undermind their economic rents.

So here's the challenge: who thinks that not knowing what regular expressions are, or thinking that a feature request is wrong, is an indication of knowing what you're doing as an open source developer in the GNU/Linux community?

While this on going discussion is not a specific, tactical Q&A on code, it is a specific discussion of what it is to work on that code, and the expectation of that code's consumers: the GNU/Linux/Open Source community, and end-users the world over. I'm "chop chewing" because of what I've found in this CRITICAL application's development forum.

Teachers correct, some learn, some cheat, others blame. Fact is, none of us matter -- except for the users of gimp. If we care about them, then we're not so different after all.

David Weeks

PS -- my deference to the French, and to Microsoft. America would be English, were it not for aid of France, and computers would be Apple, Unix or IBM, were it not for the aid of Microsoft. Ask those of us who were there, when a "pop" of Unix ran $2500 a seat, and Microsoft could be had for $100. I'm glad Richard Stallman, Linus Torvaldes(sp?), Vinton Cerf and company, and the internet community furthered the perfection of software technology. The strongest contribution being Freedom.

David Weeks wrote:

Tolerance isn't the lack of criticism, and intolerance isn't the act of criticism, and beyond that, some things are tolerable, and some things are not. So let's drop the "troll" "intolerant" "ignorant" crap and deal with information. These reactions are human nature, and responsible for the strife in the world; just look at this list.

Actually, your abusive behaviour's been responsible for the strife on the list. People in general have been polite, even offerring you an excuse to back out early (drunkenness) and get back to business. But that wasn't good enough for you, so you started another 2 threads (including this one). Please, drop it.

Free discusion of ideas means it's all good, even the bad and the ugly, cause that bad and ugly might be the fact that we're wrong, and someone was rude in pointing it out.

Actually, free discussion comes with some responsibility. A good question to ask is "Would I write this e-mail to a work colleague I'm going to meet beside the coffee machine?" - I don't think you would have. Or if you had, you would have been a bit more articulate :)

In brief, you're new to the list (your first mail was a couple of weeks ago about MNG support - I looked), and should probably avoid abusive behaviour for a while, unless you want to get a bad name, and be ignored.

My problem of recent days started with a reply to a requested feature: mng support. The response I got was that I had a lot of nerve asking someone else to slave for me.

That's inaccurate.

So here's the challenge: who thinks that not knowing what regular expressions are, or thinking that a feature request is wrong, is an indication of knowing what you're doing as an open source developer in the GNU/Linux community?

This is the GIMP community, not the GNU/Linux community. And here, not knowing what a regex is is probably the norm. And open source developers don't have to code on Unix.

Please, keep quiet for a while, for your own good.

Cheers, Dave.

Thus spoke David Weeks

My problem of recent days started with a reply to a requested feature: mng support. The response I got was that I had a lot of nerve asking someone else to slave for me. I got that from the same who's never even HEARD of regular expressions, and is now an active partner in the development of gimp?

GIMP isn't text processing, so it wouldn't be out of character to have developers who don't know regex's. I wouldn't expect them to know about transaction processing and rollbacks (both DB terms) or pinning and ioctl's (kernel terms) either. It's nice when we do. But it's not required.

While this on going discussion is not a specific, tactical Q&A on code, it is a specific discussion of what it is to work on that code, and the expectation of that code's consumers: the GNU/Linux/Open Source community, and end-users the world over.

The "GNU/Linux/Open Source community" is too vague to be considered a target audience. Kernel developers are not big users of the GIMP, for example. The target audience, in the most general terms (which really aren't very useful if you're trying to make decisions on what to do next) are artists, be they part of the open source community or not.