GIMP is alive, even if it doesn't look so

Recently, there was a mail to the gimp mailing list, that suggested selling some gimp stuff in an online shop in the gimp website (gimp stickers, mugs, T-shirts, etc.). I like the eidea, but this isn't what I came to discuss todau. Here are 2 quotes from the responses that the suggestion got:

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 8:27 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

One of the things discussed at LGM was moving all project's domain and subdomains to a single dedicated server. We have a person willing to do the migration and a person to create a new website.

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Michael Schumacher wrote:

We're currently unable to update the website (if you have a look at the index page, even the release announcements aren't up to date).

Until this is resolved, we won't be able to add, edit or remove anything to, on or from http://www.gimp.org/.

Some of you are probably going to respond like this: "WTF?! You have a website and you can't update it?!". My response was also something of that style. As developers of open source projects, we don't need the main website to know it's alive. However, the gimp user community probably think that this project is dead (6+ months without a single update of the site, not even about a call for students for Google Summer of Code!).

So, after some discussions yesterday, in a thread that I started (and you can see the conversation here) several things happened:

• The maintainer of the server was contacted - the site is going to be fixed soon (Thanks to Alexia Death that started working on it recently, even before this mailing session). Although the actual length of "soon" may vary, it's on the TODO list.
• The idea of some sort of developer blogs was raised, and several people volunteered to update them (including me). We'll have to see how does updating the site goes, and maybe we will create these blog(s).
• There was a recent discussion about weekly/daily builds. These builds will serve us by allowing other people to find bugs, and it will serve the community by showing them the latest developments (and that the gimp project is still alive). It wasn't decided yet if there will be such builds - some developers object (since this can generate many useless bug reports if people who don't understand gimp will try the betta) and some support this (since people are already using such builds, so let's make it controlled so we get reports from builds in controlled enviroments).
• New builds will hopefully be released soon:
  
  • A new stable version release 2.6.X with some more bugfixes 
  •  A new unstable build, 2.7.X to replace the old one. This will allow users to see the new features and report bugs so we can fix them. Hopefully, there will be more frequent unstable builds.
  Again, keep in mind that the definition of soon is very flexible...
• I'm going to post an offical guide on compiling gimp on windows, on the main gimp developer website. This will probably help the people out there who want to try the latest versions, but are using windows (like me) where it's almost impossible to compile gimp :P

And now for some personal updates:

• Still waiting for my commit acces to the gimp git - I applied a week ago.
• The PDF export plugin, which I'm working on, will take a bit more time due to the exam period from the unversity.

That's all for today =)