Hi GIMPers,

During the last weeks, I collected a number or ideas for enhancing or fixing some parts of the web site. Some of these came from me, some others were suggested by various contributors or visitors (via e-mail or Bugzilla). I wanted to wait for the new web site to be officially launched before starting new discussions about these ideas, but it is probably better to start this now because nothing has happened in the last three weeks.

This message is only a summary. It will be followed on Monday by several others in which I will give more details about these ideas. These messages are all about ideas and proposals, not decisions. In other words, the goal is to discuss these issues and try to reach a consensus about whether each one is a good or a bad idea and whether it should be implemented or not. Some of these are open questions that should be discussed and for which we should find a solution.

I numbered these ideas to make the cross-references easier. "RFD" stands for "Request For Discussion", as on good old USENET.

Improvements to the gimp-web build system / making it easier for others to contribute to the web site: RFD01: Use autoconf/automake and re-organize the Makefiles RFD02: Can we relax the requirements for building simple pages? RFD03: Getting the splash screens from gimp CVS, not gimp-web RFD04: Getting and filtering the ChangeLogs from gimp CVS RFD05: Should the news be stored in gimp-web CVS or not?

Improvements to the page navigation, templates, etc.: RFD06: Highlight or dim the current section in the navigation menu RFD07: How to choose web and/or e-mail links when refering to a person? RFD08: Improved template system, separation between templates and contents

Improvements to the contents of the site: RFD09: Distribution of GIMP binaries for various platforms RFD10: Using the wiki for improving the contents of the web site

I will post these messages on Monday to the gimp-web list. I know that some GIMP contributors who are not on the gimp-web list are interested in discussing some of these ideas. Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to join that list because the subscription mechanism is not working anymore (both the web-based form and the e-mail to the list request address are broken). That's why I am cross-posting this summary and waiting until Monday before posting the next messages: if you want to be included on the CC list of some or all of these messages, please tell me before Monday so that you can participate in the discussion.

-Raphaël

On 18 Oct 2003 12:10:07 +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:

Carol Spears writes:

The early splash screens were a mess to get from CVS. They were moved all around and the version number changed often. They were a nightmare to retrieve; thank goodness yosh did it.

We still move things around and I would even like to rename the file once more. But a simple list of GIMP versions with splash filenames and CVS revisions should do the trick.

My goal is to have a script that can do most of the stuff automatically. The script would do a "cvs log" on gimp/data/images/gimp_splash.png and the .ppm files that were used earlier. From this, it would extract the revision tags ("symbolic names") and extract the list of GIMP revisions following the pattern GIMP___. For each of the tagged revisions, it would do a "cvs checkout -r -p" to get the file and store the result using the appropriate file name (including the version number). Well, it is a bit more complicated than that, but hopefully you get the idea.

The only things that the script would need as input are the current file name of the splash screen and the previous ones. From this, it can extract all revisions of these files (including on the gimp-1-2 branch). The script would automatically get the latest version from gimp CVS, so it would not be necessary to copy and commit it in gimp-web CVS whenever a new splash screen is added. So this would be one more step towards the goal of making the web site as maintenance-free as possible.

For the details, see the message that I will post to the gimp-web list in a few hours (RFD03).

-Raphaël

On 20 Oct 2003 17:13:46 +0200, Sven Neumann wrote: [...]

I understood this w/o your explanation, but the problem is that the splash has not always been called gimp_splash.png and it will not always be called gimp_splash.png. So instead of going through the hassle of coping with all these exceptions, it would probably be a lot easier to manually maintain a simple file with this information. This is just a suggestion, do as you like.

But this is exactly what I suggested in the part of my message that you did not quote: "The only things that the script would need as input are the current file name of the splash screen and the previous ones." There is no need to keep the list of CVS versions in that file, because the script can fetch them from CVS (and therefore make sure that it gets the latest ones).

For more details, see the message RFD03 that I will post in a few minutes to the gimp-web list. Hmmm... Maybe I will cross-post RFD03 to the gimp-developer list as well, since this thread has been cross-posted to both lists. I will not post all RFDs today because I still have to work on some of them and I am running out of time, but I will at least try to post the first three or four.

-Raphaël