I am unable to get a GIMP plugin written in Python (.py) to work on my system. I have discovered that GIMP was initially built without support for Python plugins. On other operating systems, it is sufficient to install the gimp-python package and GIMP will then have support for Python plugins, but for some reason there is no such RPM package available in Fedora 39.
I tried an alternative approach and downloaded an Appimage file with plugin support, but when launching this Appimage GIMP gives an error: “Failed to execute child process, python or python2 not found”. However, Python (version 3) and Python2 are installed on my system.
How can I add support for Python plugins? I would prefer to do this without alternative methods, and instead install an additional RPM package via dnf.
A few years ago, GIMP used to work out-of-the-box with plugins on Fedora, it’s a shame this was removed!
Yes, you’re right that Python support was the default, but GIMP still didn’t understand the plugins. I installed the pygtk2 RPM package and everything started working.
The corresponding bug is here. There are actually two issues:
gimp should “require” pygtk2, or else not even the gimp-python console works
Not much of the python2 ecosystem is left in Fedora.
So, as soon as your plugin needs a python package, you will have to get the python2 version from outside of Fedora.
Gimp 3 will use python 3, but the python plug-in interface changed completely and - as of yet - seems to lack some functionality. Also, there is no release timeline that I know of. So we might have to deal with Gimp 2/Python 2 for a while …