Re: The GIMP! By gum, I forgot all about it!

[Lauri Alanko <la@iki.fi>]

On Thu, Oct 29, 1998 at 01:56:46PM -0500, it occurred to Jim Blandy to write:
> 
> > Where's this text from?
> 
> http://www.red-bean.com/guile/notes/ideas.html
> 
> > Anyway, I've gotten this to a somewhat workable state, though it
> > still needs finishing and is currently on hold (not too much
> > interest..). It's in gnome cvs, in gimp-plugins-unstable/gimple.
> 
> > I haven't touched it in a couple of months, though, so it might not work with
> > recent guile and guile-gtk..
> > 
> > Anyway, the long term plan is to make gimp use CORBA for external
> > communication, so ultimately, a guile interface for ORBit is more
> > important. (Note that ORBit doesn't have proper DII or DSI working yet,
> > though)
> 
> Here's what I'm going for (Jim's political ambitions come to light): I
> want Guile to be the default system for doing script-fu.  If a
> newcomer asks, "What is this script-fu thing, and how do I get some?"
> then I want them to end up with Guile installed on their system.

Hee. I think one of the reasons why we haven't yet made the transition to
guile is that guile is rather a big dependency, if you can't do scripting
without it. It's only a matter of time, though..

> How do people get script-fu now?  Is SIOD distributed with the GIMP?

Yes. It's so small you don't easily notice it, though. :)

> For political reasons, I want Guile to be as "primary" as SIOD.
> By spring 1999, Guile should be far enough along that I'll be able to
> give you technical reasons too.

Um, you don't need too many technical reasons to justify replacing SIOD. :)
The main problem with guile is currently - you guessed it - startup
speed. Currently I have resolved this with the usual server hack.

Actually, since guile 1.3 is now out, and guile-gtk is pretty mature too, the
interfaces are probably stable enough to make gimple a full gimp extension. If
it is to replace script-fu, it has to be able to run siod code for backwards
compatibility. Gimple can currently do this pretty well (with lotsa syntax
hacks), but not perfectly.

Phew.. as if I wasn't busy enough already..


Lauri Alanko
la@iki.fi