Hi All,
Those of you who have tried Gimp-2.7 no doubt noticed that the syntax has changed.
I would like to volunteer to rewrite them.
But where could I find a list of the "old and obsolete" and the new?
Gerard.

I am trying to cope with the GAL v. 1.0.7 - unfortunately not updated since 11.08.2010
http://registry.gimp.org/node/24833

I'm waiting for the 2.8 stable before I rewrite any of my scripts. By definition 2.7 is unstable and the pdb calls may, and probably, will continue to change.

-Rob A>

I now have the Gimp-2.7.* installs from git sources in a separate Gentoo Linux partition.
After I did the last install yesterday I copied over my 2.6.11 scripts and plugin folders from my /home folders to this one.
One way to catch error messages from a program is to start it from a console.(command line)
Well this was very enlightening!
Gimp complained about a whole lot of missing libraries needed for some of the scripts/plugins.
I simply installed them one by one and now these things will probably work ok.
I had to make a symlink in one case.
Gerard.

The only reason to write a 2.8 version of a 2.6 script would be to take advantage of new features available in 2.8. Any other problem with running a 2.6 script on 2.8 should be treated as a bug.

@saulgoode,
In the past I noticed that scripts/plugins that worked fine in 2.6 didn't in 2.7.
I haven't had time to do any further checking but with missing libs a script/plugin sure will fail.
When you compile from git it checks for all kinds of libs before compilation.
Scripts/plugins are external so ./autogen.sh can't check if libs needed are installed.
Gerard.

If you encounter such problems with scripts (as in Script-fu) then they definitely need to be addressed as part of the development process of version 2.7. I had previously noted that a few scripts failed because the gimp-image-get-layers function only returns the "top-most" level of layers/groups; at the time I suggested that 'get-layers' should probably get all layers regardless how deeply they might be nested in a group but I do not know if that suggestion was incorporated (it is admittedly not the best approach for some situations).

If plug-ins limit themselves to libgimp and PDB calls, there should be no problem with missing libraries. If the plug-in depends upon outside libraries then their effectiveness will always be contingent upon the compatibility of those third-party libraries -- in which case you would be correct about there being a need to update such plug-ins (however, no "scripts" depend on non-GIMP libraries).


I'm not sure what you mean -- (but I do not consider that sufficient cause to be reticent ). Scripts only rely upon the Procedural DataBase (PDB) interface. Plug-ins use either the PDB or libgimp, with the aforementioned caveat. In theory, any changes to the APIs of the PDB and libgimp are supposed to be backwards compatible during minor version updates such as from 2.6 to 2.8 (a major version change, such as from 2.8 to 3.0, is permitted to modify the APIs).

But then, as the saying goes: in theory practice is the same as theory, but in practice not so much. Nonetheless, that is my reasoning in suggesting that any incompatibility between 2.6 and 2.8 plug-ins should be treated as a bug.

Of course, if the plug-ins to which you are referring are written in Python, then it is most probably a bug in the Python extension. But given Python's delusions of adequacy as a programming language ( ), this will always be the case and anyone coding in Python should recognize their dependence upon proper functioning of that added layer of incompatibility between their plug-ins and GIMP.

These are the messages before installing the missing dependencies:


And this is after installing the missing stuff.

You're right about scripts.
The libpng problem was caused by the plugin wanting an older version than installed.
Courtesy Gentoo both are installed but in different "slots".
The libexiv2 problem was a matter of adding a symlink with the same name pointing to the exiv2 lib.
Python-2.7 and 3.1 are installed.
Gerard.