GIMP 2.6.0 has been released and you are curious what’s new? You can compile it yourself and try it out.

Basic procedure:

1) Install the necessary packages to compile programs. Make sure gcc, g++, ruby (for the docs), and the development versions of some basic libraries are installed. If one of the “configure” processes below fails because it needs a certain library, install it. For instance, if configure tells you “Can’t find xxx”, install “libxxx-dev”.

After each of the following "configure"s, you will see which libraries will be used when compiling and which will be not. Example:

…
Windows ICO yes
WMF: no (libwmf not found)
XJT: yes
…

So if you need WMF (Windows Metafile) support, you would have to install libwmf-dev.

For my version of GIMP, I have installed these libraries, maybe you want them too: graphviz-dev libaa1-dev libexif-dev libgnomeui-dev libgtk2.0-dev liblcms1-dev libpoppler-dev librsvg2-dev libtiff-dev libwebkitgtk-dev libxpm-dev python-gtk2-dev

2) Download the tarballs from the respective file servers (take the most recent version):
babl from ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/babl/
GEGL from ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gegl/
GIMP from ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/

3) Extract babl, then do:
./configure —prefix=/opt/gimp-2.6
make
sudo make install

4) Make binaries, includes, libraries in /opt/gimp-2.6 available for use:
export PATH=/opt/gimp-2.6/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.6/lib
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.6/lib/pkgconfig

5) Extract GEGL, then do:
./configure —prefix=/opt/gimp-2.6
make
sudo make install

6) Extract GIMP, then do:
./configure —prefix=/opt/gimp-2.6
make
sudo make install

7) Enjoy with “/opt/gimp-2.6/bin/gimp-2.6”