GIMP 2.7.2 released for testing

In a post on its homepage, the GIMP project has announced the release of the second point update to the 2.7.x branch of GIMP (an acronym for the GNU Image Manipulation Program). The 2.7.x series is the project's unstable development branch which is building towards the next stable release, version 2.8. While an official release date for GIMP 2.8 has yet to be confirmed, the project is currently targeting late November of this year.

GIMP 2.7.2 features a number of updates to the application's user interface and brushes, including the replacement of the brush scale control in tool options, and more compact selectors. The text tool now better handles right-to-left (RTL) mode and handle sizes in tools are also more consistent. Developed as part of a previous Google Summer of Code (GSoC) (the 2011 GSoC is currently taking place), the cage transform tool has also been merged into this release. Other changes include Core, plug-in and documentation updates, "a lot of undeprecations due to GTK+ 2.22 and 2.24" and fixes for several memory leaks, as well as various bug fixes and translation updates.

The previous development milestone, GIMP 2.7.1, included a number of improvements to the application's graphical user interface (GUI). For instance, it added a single-window mode which doesn't display elements such as the tools menus or layers menus in separate windows next to the image window, instead lining these elements up alongside the image in the same window.

The developers note that, as with all unstable / development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

Further details about the Development Branch release can be found in a incorrectly labelled post on the GIMP developer mailing list, in the release notes and in the change log. At the time of this posting, the GIMP NEWS page has yet to be updated with the details of the 2.7.2 release.

Sources for GIMP 2.7.2 are available to download from the project's FTP servers (FTP link), as well as the various mirrors. The latest stable release is GIMP 2.6.11, a maintenance and bug fix release from October 2010 that addressed an issue that affected printing and print preview. GIMP is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).

See also:

• Version 3 of the GTK+ used by GNOME and GIMP has been released, a report from The H.
• Is it time for Free software to move on?, a report from The H.

(crve)