There are news about it on gimpusers.com. Thanks to Torbjorn, who posted in the forum about this.
Some highlights:
Years over years GIMPusers waited for this feature – now a dream has finally become true: Layer Groups for GIMP will be available in GIMP 2.8! more…
There is an interesting message of Martin Nordholts, one of the core developers of GIMP, in the official mailing list about GIMP 2.8 being shipped in a single window mode. more…
And finally a writeup of all the goodies we will get (perhaps for Christmas 
):
Most probably, GIMP 2.8 will yet be released 2009, so it has been time to have a look at the current developer version. There are many cool new features, but the most important thing for us are the layer groups. more…
Tags: 2.8, GIMP Version 2.8
Very cool features. I can’t wait for GIMP 2.8.
I’ll update the script to build from the development version instead of the beta. Until now I haven’t done that because something always borked out.
Good idea! When that script is ready, I’ll try it and give 2.7.x a test run. Of course with a life broadcast.
The script is on its way, I’d rather not post it on the forum yet, it’s still really experimental.
I have it – I’ll test it and then set it free – if it doesn’t kill my system…..
I’ve tried to build the dev from git yesterday, but get some errors on make
On the picture very down stands IMG_5748.CR2 (889,5 MB). I think this is false. How can it be that big? Maybe 8,895 MB is right?
The image has 12 MPixel, that translates to 48MB per layer. 7 layers = 350MB. You are right, there are 500MB missing. Perhaps a memory leak
or undo information.
Maybe the picture were forged. Around here that could maybe be. Many computers can not hold so big pictures in the memory you can simple ignore 500MB. New version was described today and she at once has that. There is no download somewhere. Strange.
What are you talking about? 2.7.1, the version in the screenshot, was available in late august it seems[1], and the last of the three articles from Gimpuser (the one showing all the new features) was made on Friday, not today (Sunday). So the image uses almost 900MB of the system memory, it could be as Rolf says, undo history, or even a bug. Hardly grounds for speculation about the veracity of the image, I think.
[1] http://linuxhub.net/2009/08/gimp-2-7-1-installation-guide-for-ubuntu/
Rolf is right, the undo stack is taking its toll. I had shuffled some layers around and applied curves to them before taking the screenshot. But the value seems to be more an estimation than a real measurement, Gimp only uses about 600MB of resident memory, according to top, and 150MB of temporary swap space, while the statusline now says 920MB. The resulting xcf file is only 470MB. Enabling gegl increases the memory consumption quite a lot, too. As soon as all images are closed, memory size drops to about 10MB, so no leak there. This is also the reason I wrote in my challenge entry to scale down the photos, the original sized file would have easily been in this area too.
Wihoo!
This is fantastic news, one of the Gimps few large drawbacks is finally fixed. One of the others, macro recording, is now set for milestone 2.10 so hopefully well have that in yet next version!
Is this layer feature compatible with psd and tiff-images? (i.e opening layered images properly)
Send me a PSD and a TIFF and I’ll test it.
Here’s what I used to build gimp-2.7 on Fedora 11 using git sources.
1. (in some convenient work directory)
git clone git://git.gnome.org/gimp
git clone git://git.gnome.org/babl
git clone git://git.gnome.org/gegl
This downloads the 3 projects’ source code to 3 subdirs gimp, babl, gegl
2. (cd to the babl subdir and run)
./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
3. (cd to the ../gegl subdir and run)
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/local
./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
4. (cd to the ../gimp subdir and run)
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/local
./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
You will endup with a program installed in /usr/local/bin, which you can execute with:
/usr/local/bin/gimp-2.7
Notes:
- order: build/install babl then gegl then gimp
- the “–prefix=/usr/local” is necessary/desirable to avoid conflicts with the standard gimp/babl/gegl.
- the PKG_CONFIG_PATH fixes errors complaining about missing (incorrect) versions of babl and gegl. It forces the autogen script to look for babl.pc and gegl.pc files in the specified directory. You can save a few keystrokes by first typing
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
and leaving out the “PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig” for the separate commands.
- you can delete the sources afterwards, if desired
~jim
Correction to prior post:
ignore the 2 cases of a second “./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/local” command following the “PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/local” command.
~jim
One more thing: if you get error messages about loading libraries, you may have to run gimp-2.7 by a command like
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib /usr/local/bin/gimp-2.7
~jim
[...] Video Update: What will be in GIMP 2.8? [...]
When is 2.8 planned for release? Going by gimp.org and developer.gimp.org, there seem to be no plans for any future releases—where’s the roadmap?
There is no release plan, sorry! They highly depend on voluntary help which is simply not possible to plan. They usually say something like: “Hopefully out still this year.”
So you can just be patient and wait – or participate