r/GIMP • u/DaeOnReddit • 4d ago
GIMP Updating question - Mac
Hi GIMP devs! This isn't really a support request as I'm not reporting a bug, I'd say this is more a feature request.
I have two computers I use regularly: my home computer, which runs MacOSx Sequoia 15.7.5, and my work computer, which runs Windows...11 I think? When I go to update GIMP on my Windows machine, I can click 'update', download the new GIMP exe from your website, and when I open the EXE, it detects that I already have GIMP installed and instead of doing the regular installation process, there's a button that says 'update' and it'll just update my current install.
Are there any plans to have this feature be a part of Mac's GIMP? Would there be any limitations that prevent you from doing this as third party, open source developers? Like I know I've used plenty of Mac software in the past that had a little dialogue that would pop up that said 'xyz software has an update! Would you like to install it or do that later?' and then I would click 'install' and it would take care of the updating by itself without me having to do the install manually (aka go to the website, download the new dmg, move the new version into my Applications folder, replace the old version).
I think this would be super helpful and help people's workflow because it would make installing an update much easier as it would save us a few clicks. :) Then maybe if it updates the current install, the old one can be moved into the trash kinda like how Windows does it? So then if we don't like the newest version for whatever reason, we can revert to what we had before without having to find the old dmg on the GIMP previous releases page online? Just a thought.
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u/CMYK-Student GIMP Team 3d ago
Hi! Honestly, we haven't had too many active macOS developers in the past, so it kind of limits what we can do on macOS specific stuff. Recently one of our main developers got a Mac, so there've been a number of recent improvements. If you're willing to post this request on our tracker so they see it (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/work_items), it might be possible to implement.