Maintainer Corner

This is the Maintainer Corner in the wider sense, i.e. any person who is in charge of some aspect of GIMP infrastructure.

Here, we will gather info on how to perform our tasks efficiently.

GIMP Maintainers

GIMP maintainers have a few more responsibilities than most contributors, in particular regarding releases and coordination.

Some of these duties include:

  • Setting the version of GIMP as well as the API version
  • Maintaining the AppStream metadata
  • Making releases
  • Managing dependencies: except for core projects (such as babl and GEGL), we should stay as conservative as possible for the stable branch (otherwise distributions might end up getting stuck providing very old GIMP versions). On development builds, we should verify any mandatory dependency is at the very least available in Debian testing, MSYS2 and MacPorts. We may be a bit more adventurous for optional dependencies yet stay reasonable (a feature is not so useful if nobody can build it). In any case, any dependency bump must be carefully weighed within reason, especially when getting close to make the development branch into the new stable branch. See also os-support.txt.
  • Manage other contributors, give developer rights to the Gitlab project, etc.
  • Maintain milestones
  • Maintain our roadmaps
  • Maintain NEWS file in GIMP repository. Any developer is actually encouraged to update it when they do noteworthy changes, but this is the maintainers' role to do the finale checks and make sure we don’t miss anything. One purpose of this file is to make it as easy as possible to write release notes based on this file rather than reviewing hundreds of commits.

Current GIMP maintainers are Jehan and mitch.

Other maintainance roles

Other types of responsibilities exist, the accounts managers page list contributors with various maintenance or administrative roles.