"Pinta-classic" WIP patchset for Pinta 1.7.1 (should I fork?)

[Zzooouhh]

Hello, I'd like to announce that I am presently working on a patchset for the last GTK2 version of Pinta (1.7.1). There are several reasons for why I chose this particular version: 1. some Linux distros (plus FreeBSD) ship this as the latest version of Pinta in their repos, 2. this older version of Pinta is still riddled with numerous significant bugs and missing GUI features, 3. I still find GTK2 convenient, and I enjoy the classic old Pinta GUI look which I simply embellished with new hotkeys and other workflow enhancements.

I can post the full changelog later today, but there were around 50 issues addressed in total; among other things, I've mainly fixed every crash I've encountered, added new mnemonics and hotkeys (e.g. the Shift+[] to change brush size which I've seen in the PRs recently), several adjustments to how selections work (more keys to deselect, paste now remembers the XY position of the selection, arrow keys to move selection...), backported some rendering enhancements from upstream, made Pinta run as a single process, and added a few nifty features inspired by the discussion threads on here (e.g. Alt+mouseclick as a shortcut for color picker).

This patchset is already mostly ready and the remaining work from my side is primarily cleanup. My disclaimer is that most of it was developed with LLM help, but I make sure to thoroughly test every step to minimize the risk of introducing any more bugs (as I intend it for my own daily personal use as well). It has been developed and tested on FreeBSD's port of Pinta, where it requires zero build changes beyond including the patch file; I believe the same will apply to other OS/distros shipping this version.

I am not a programmer by trade; I have some knowledge of Javascript, but comparably little of C#. This is my first time working on a project of this scope, so I'd like some public discussion and guidance about the best strategy to get this patchset out there, plus there were some choices made in the new code which I was unsure about. I don't intend to update it much in the longterm, ideally it'd be a one and done affair. I could splinter it off as a maintenance fork, let's say under the name "pinta-classic" or similar. What do you think?

[cameronwhite]

Yeah I think making your own fork would be the way to go - I don't have any interest in maintaining the 1.7.x branch myself :) I would suggest naming it something along the lines of "pinta-gtk2" to make its scope clear

[Zzooouhh]

Thank you for the feedback. I prefer a more agnostic name than "pinta-gtk2", because I can't rule out being forced into a barebones GTK3 port later on, depending on how the GTK2 situation will be developing in the near future. I'd say my current scope here was to start with the layout and basic feel of the GTK2 version and refine the UX side (to be more Paint.NET adherent), while keeping framework changes to a minimum.