'Heal Selection' Missing in Gimp 2.10.6 on Ubuntu 18.10

[Dave Rove]

I've just updated Ubuntu from version 18.04 to 18.10, and that has updated Gimp from 2.8.? to 2.10.6.

One of the features that I regularly use is "Heal Selection" that appears in the Filters->Enhance menu, but it's absent from Ubuntu's Gimp 2.10.6. Anybody know why?

I understand that the "Heal Selection" feature uses the Resynthesizer plugin, and in Ubuntu that is included in the "gimp-plugin-registry" package, a package that contains multiple plugins, and I do have that installed. The Resynthesizer's own menu entry is present in its usual place at Filters->Map->Resynthesize, but that doesn't include the "Heal Selection" feature.

Has "Heal Selection" been deliberately removed from Gimp 2.10? Or does it now live in its own plugin that needs to be installed from somewhere? Or is this likely to be an oversight by Ubuntu's package maintainers? Or have I missed something obvious (which I must admit is often the case). Any ideas, please?

[rich2005]

There was a similar post a few days ago

https://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-No-hea...5#pid11015

Check that you have the gimp-python package installed.

The previous poster could not find the gimp-python package in the 'buntu cosmic repo. I do not know why. It is there for me. screenshots: https://i.imgur.com/EASQLwg.jpg

Of course if you are relying on the dumbed down 'ubuntu' shop then there might be problems.

Resynthesizer shows up because it is a compiled plug-in but the ''heal'' plugins are python.

[Dave Rove]

(10-22-2018, 04:47 PM)rich2005 Wrote: Check that you have the gimp-python package installed.

Thanks! That was it.

It's a bit counter-intuitive. The description for the gimp-python package is: "This package contains the python scripting extension for GIMP and the plugins making use of that extension." I'd have assumed that meant it was just for supporting Python scripts that you might find on the web and manually install in Gimp's plugin directory. But no, I see that it enables many extra features — the filter->enhance submenu has about 5 extra features, for example.

I've checked with an old Ubuntu 17.10 installation, and I can see that the gimp-python package did not exist back then ­— its content must have been included in the main Gimp 2.8 package. I don't know why they decided to hive it off. Maybe it should be made a dependency of the gimp-plugin-registry package.

[rich2005]

All it does is allow Gimp to run python plug-ins. All those extras come from (probably) the bloody-awful gimp-plugin-registry package, along with a few dozen script-fu that you will never use and a couple that have not worked since Gimp 2.6

edit: file list of what you get: https://packages.ubuntu.com/cosmic/all/g...y/filelist

The package should be marked as a dependency. It was in earlier versions. Just marked as a 'recommended'. Oversight by the maintainers - maybe, more likely an automated script that pulls packages from Debian without anyone looking at them.