Last night GIMP's team had a first official online meeting and came up with a plan for the nearest future and a prioritized list of features for 2.8 and beyond.

Speaking of nearest plans the team finds it most urgent to bring back wiki.gimp.org to life which will probably be current Alexia's unofficial wiki that contains information for newly joined developers.

Likewise urgent are releasing of the next unstable version and deciding what projects could be done for Google Summer of Code 2011 and who could be mentoring. Needless to say, if you want to participate, please join gimp-developer@ mailing list and introduce yourself.

Speaking of priorities, releasing v2.8 is still the highest one, with optional single-window mode still to finish as well as layers groups to get a cleanup (masks for layer groups, per-layer clips possible too).

After releasing 2.8 the team will focus on making 3.0 a short-cycle release based on GTK+3 and featuring high bit depth editing. Since a lot of GIMP has already been ported to GTK+3 by Michael Natterer, the team is likely to focus on further integration of GEGL by the time 2.8 is out.

Faster release of v3.0 is also desirable because GTK+2 is horribly broken with regards to graphic tablets and isn't likely to be fixed, which, sadly, means that many excellent improvements in the brush engine won't be of much use for Windows based users of GIMP 2.8.

According to current plans v3.2 is likely to introduce long overdue non-destructive editing. Some other important features like recording and playback of scripts, JavaScript support and native CMYK support are also on the radar. However they have prerequisites like complete GEGL integration are thus are currently lowest in the list of priorities and not yet assigned to any of the planned versions.

It's important to note that there are no calendar-like plans for neither 2.8, nor 3.0 or 3.2 whatsoever. The only way to make them be released faster is to join the team and take some responsibilities.