Open File Format for Raster/Bitmaps Graphics

[Cyrille Berger]

Hello,

Firstly, I invite developers of The Gimp, Cinepaint, Krita and any other 
projects interested in talking about an Open File Format for Raster/Bitmaps 
Graphics to join the create mailing list at freedesktop.org (more information 
at http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create) and not to answer it 
on specific projects mailing list.

So this discution is about a common file for graphics applications, and used 
for sharing graphics between different projects, like OASIS's opendocument is 
for office applications, and svg for vectorial graphics.

### Three Steps

I think we should divide the effort of defining the specification of the file 
format in three steps :
1) identification of needs, problems and requirements
2) general technical solutions
3) writing the specs

### A roadmap

I propose that we follow this roadmap:
- until the end of March, everyone express freely what he thinks are the 
needs / problems 
- someone (a native speaker would be better I guess) will then write the draft 
of the list of requirements for the specification, after this document is 
produce, we take some time to think about what we have forgotten, what need 
to be add and modified, and the final version will be published for the end 
of April the begining of May
- until the end of june, we take between a month or two months to discuss the 
general technical solutions and we decide who (a group of person) will be 
charge of writting the draft of the specification

It would be nice to have the specification ready for the end of the year. And 
as the specifications has to be extensible, it seems to be a reasonable goal.

Please note, that this roadmap is just an indication, I have no idea of how 
much time each steps will require.

-- 
--- Cyrille Berger ---