gimp should be able to record macro

I'd like very much to see an ubuntu developer do this and make us non-programmers happy :)

Upstream problem, there is no real use to open an Ubuntu bug about that, that's a feature request and could be work with a spec. That's likely to be very low priority though and the desktop team has many other topics to work, that's probably not going to be worked by Ubuntu

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51937 here's the upstream bug report. A summary:

 "the main point of the GEGL image processing graph is that you can easily
apply the same processing steps to any image. It will essentially be macro
recording, only better, and using a somewhat different approach."

so when GEGL is completely done (staged to be completely integrated by 2.8 I think?), macros will naturally follow.