On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 12:24:32PM +0100, Marek Szuba wrote:
> On 2023-10-26 02:29, Jonas Stein wrote:
> 
> > this is a very powerful package with many users.
> 
> ...but sadly, very few maintainers. It was m-n when I took it over 3 years
> ago, as apparently no-one found it worth looking after following the
> disbanding of the Graphics project - and that was back when upstream still
> used CMake! Telling the truth I wasn't exactly interested either, it's just
> that it happened to be an optional dependency of media-gfx/darktable.
> 
> > Thank you for maintaining it till now.
> 
> You're very welcome!
> 
> > Could you address the exact problems to upstream, so they are aware and
> > can improve it?
> > I think not only Gentoo, but also other distributions suffer if it does
> > not build smooth.
> 
> I used to do that. It seemed to have little to no effect so in the end I
> just gave up.
> 
> > Looks to me as if the package is not broken now, but there is a lack of
> > manpower to update it. 30 days is the minimum for a removal.
> 
> There are two outstanding QA issues (ignored LDFLAGS and pre-stripped
> binaries) in 3.3.1 pertaining to USE=gimp and USE=qt5. Prior to adding that
> version I tried to leverage qmake-utils.eclass in the Qt parts of the
> package, which hopefully would have got rid of these issues - but resulted
> in a wall of actual errors. This has been the last straw as far as me
> maintaining G'MIC is concerned.
> 
> > I suggest to keep it for a few more months.
> 
> Fine by me if someone actually maintains it. I've just dropped
> media-gfx/gmic back to m-n to make it clear that I do not intend to block it
> from being reactivated.
> 
> -- 
> Marecki
> 

This is quite a loss. Ever since the dropping the gimp-resynthesizer plugin (due
to Python2 deprecation) gmic was the last package to provide "heal selection"
functionality in GIMP. Losing gmic will put GIMP behind other image editing
software by a significant margin.

I'm wondering if we could collaborate with other distro developers on building
and improving the state of this package. E.g. Debian seems to be packaging gmic
by itself and also for gimp and krita. I wonder if it's possible to build the
gimp plugin portion only and not deal with gmic QT frontend?

Zoltan