Hm. Hmph. Hummm.
Seems that, for a while at any rate, you were running off of an antique update file. That would explain old categories, but not quite a filter count as low as forty five; It seems on day one there were around a hundred. I don't think the count was ever as low as forty five. That suggest an antique file which was also incomplete - an anomality indeed.
Only fools believe in foolproof, but as you may have gathered from my previous post, I've backed away from the idea of 'transmission burps.' It goes down the wire as a compressed zip file, which is just as valuable as an integrity checking tool as it is a traffic minimizer. Once the unzipper on your computer notices that its computed CRC differs from what sender computed, it declares failure and that is that. So, updateXXXX.gmic either arrives whole and sane or it doesn't arrive at all. There is a vanishingly small chance of a corrupt file getting through the gamut, but I'm rather more inclined to bet that the next Pope is Protestant.
There is the thought that maybe somebody momentarily put the wrong file on the server, and before they went OOPS! and put the right file on the server, you timed your update to get a broken file. Well, there's certainly a possibility of that -- far more likely than an Episcopalian Pontiff -- but still, I think, with a probability in the range of a fraction of a percentage. I base this on the fact that updateXXXX.gmic is built by scripted automation, and while it may have started out life buggy, that was a few years ago. Its obvious gaffs were observed and fixed a long time ago, and that leaves the not-so-obvious gaffs which don't happen that often. I suppose that's why it is a pity that no one had a chance to look into the update file which gave you such a curious result. I'm sure there was a story in there to be told. But it's gone and you can't be blamed for deleting it, since getting rid of a (possibly corrupt) filter definition file is probably a good first step toward getting Gimp and G'MIC back on track. If all else fails - Internet connection, update file integrity - there are built into the gmic-gimp plug-in a text section that contains the filter definitions that were extant when the plug-in was compiled. They're not the most current, but they work, and if, in start up, the plugin can't find a filter definition file anywhere, those are the filters which populate the tree. That's why a freshly installed gmic-gimp plugin has filter definitions before the first refresh request happens.
So we'll probably never know why you only had forty five filters that day. Maybe if lightning strikes again - you or somebody else - that the weird update file gets saved for forensics. One fear that I hope to dispel is this especially pernicious one about never --
never -- hitting the Refresh button. If that gains a common currency (and I fear it
has gained a common currency), then the newer, more experimental filters never get tried out. And that stymies G'MIC's growth.
Now, I can appreciate the fact that when one has all of the pieces working together - Gimp, G'MIC, scripts, plug-ins - one can be especially chary about doing anything that brings the whole house down. That said, the aggregate effect of Gimp-G'MIC becoming frozen on peoples' machines is that the New Stuff doesn't get exercised. Put another way, the New Stuff doesn't get a chance to bring the whole house down. Now how can those of us who fix stuff can ever fix stuff without forensics? There
is a price to Free and Open Source Software -- it just isn't monetized. The price you pay is the cost of taking a risk -- hitting the Refresh button -- and having the whole house come down. And, after the smoke clears, then paying the price of time and getting on Gimp-Chat or whever else the Gimp-G'MIC communities intersects and saying what happened and going though the cycle that you so elegantly illustrated:
-- the debugging process. As unpleasant as it may seem at the time, it is as vital a contribution to the open source community as anything else, because it forges the New Stuff into Good Stuff.
So whatever else you do, hit the Refresh button - then duck.
GRO