Oh, sorry, it’s not me who has landed that scoop. 
Sven Neumann is interviewed on Chaos Radio Express - a podcast of the german Chaos Computer Club. So this podcast is in German language.
In case that you don’t know Sven: he and Mitch keep all the developers on course and have written a lot of the code in GIMP. And “a lot” is in this case really much.
Most important for me in the short run: It is now “GIMP”, not “the GIMP”. Well, it was in the past - and “Meet the GIMP!” is such a nice name that I’ll keep it. But I’ll try to say and write “GIMP”.
Something to look out for: They want to speed up the release cycle and get out 2.6 in the next year. Nice things are coming, among them a start into 16 bit operation. No promises…..
The final goal is nondestructive postprocessing. Then you don’t change the pixels but the program notes down what you want to do in a stack of operations. And then you can go back to near the start where you used the clone tool a bit too much and redo that. All the later edits are still valid. Today you would have to redo them all. Sven said, that you could even swap the base image for an other and still get all the operations done. I want that for Christmas! (But it is years away…. )
If you’ve got dome minutes to spend, take a look at the two last videocast from “PixelPerfect with Bert Monroy” on lightroom, realy interesting concept, and it’s look we gona have this kind of power in ther Gimp somtime soon :):) I hope.
Such stuff will not be in Gimp according to Sven, but the cleaning up of the code for 2.4 and the GEGL structure should allow an easy re-use of the Gimp code.
I did’nt ment the organising stuf from lightroom , but the “nondestructive” concept who is the force of it, gona make it’s way in the gimp.
I cote
“Sven said, that you could even swap the base image for an other and still get all the operations done”
It’s simply an small extention to make.
Save the work done with GEGL as “xml” for example , and reuse it for another image, or store those transformation datas in the image format ( I’me shure they will not stop half way and implement a maner to save those datas :))
And LightRoom dose exactly that in this aspect.
for the geeky here is a interesting video on the concept of GEGL
http://ftp.belnet.be/mirrors/FOSDEM/2007/FOSDEM2007-GEGL.ogg
Actually it is GIMP, not Gimp
Thank you for a great videocast!
You are right, I am forgetting that all the time. Fixed in this post….
Rolf,
Some time ago you’ve suggested me the GIMP version 2.3.18.
But I’ve seen you using the 2.4 already for quite some time.
Would you recommend any of 2.4.x versions for production-like environment or there is still a bug-smashing needed for 2.4?
Regards, Pavel.
2.4.x - this are the stable versions. And stable in GIMP is STABLE.
I am still using one of the RC versions, because it is in the Ubuntu repositorys. But I’ll install the current version soon. Just to find the time to find out how…..
I’ll still call it the GIMP. It’s sounds better to a native English speaker, or maybe it’s just an Irish thing ..
GIMP version 2.4.0 is still hard to install on ubuntu 7.04, I have ubuntu 7.10 on my notebook and there it’s a easy way…..
on my desktop I had to compile this myself and to compile some libs before…..
This Interview with Sven Neumann was very good….
I heard it the whole time…. (about 2h)
and I bookmarked Chaosradio after that….
I would translate this into english but my english is so bad that I can’t……
there was many, we say in german “gelabber” in it, but also many facts, problems and features witch will be released in the future……
There are packages for GIMP 2.4.2 at getdeb.net