Getting Involved

Intention

GIMP is Free Software and a part of the GNU Project. In the free software world, there is generally no distinction between users and developers. As in a friendly neighbourhood, everybody pitches in to help their neighbors. Please consider the time you give in assistance to others as payment.

Ways in which you can help:

program new features,
debug existing features,
report bugs--errors in the program,
add documentation,
translate the GIMP to your own language,
translate the documentation,
write tutorials,
improve this web site,
make artwork for the GIMP used in or with the GIMP,
let people know you used the GIMP for your artwork,
give away copies of the GIMP, or
help others to learn to use the GIMP.

As you can see, everyone can help.

Bug reports

GIMP is not a bug-free application nor is any other application so reporting the bugs that you will encounter is very important to the development, it helps the developers to make GIMP more stable and more bug free.

You don't have to be a developer or a everyday user to report bugs. It can be hard to report a bug the first time you try it out but don't just quit the whole bug report if you think it is hard. Instead, look at the bugs page you will find some very good help about this.

Web development

Creating websites that contain useful information is very important. It is actually just as important as doing bug reports. A website contains a lot of information that is needed for the development to move on and it also contains information that will help the public to understand what the application is all about.

Hacking

This is the part where people are always needed to help with the development and this is also the part that is the hardest to start with. Though there are websites and files to give you a good look at how hacking is being done in the GIMP.

The site you should keep updated with and the site that is updated all the time with new development help guides is located at http://developer.gimp.org/. If you have the GIMP installed at the moment then there are some files you should look at in the source code that might help you a little.

HACKING
(Contains a lot of information that you need to know if you want to start coding)
README
(The main README file for the GIMP and should be read by everyone)
README.i18n
(The internationalization README which should be read by translators)
README.win32
(The win32 README)

Important GIMP Links

GIMP Planets

GIMP Development Links

GIMP developers
The main GIMP development website.

GIMP Development News
What happens in GIMP development, updated regularily.

GEGL
An image processing library based on GObjects.

GNOME Subversion Services
GNOME Subversion source code repository

What is going on:

The Unstable GIMP
The lastest ChangeLog entries from The Unstable GIMP.