Subject: Re: image support (was Re: Core-dump during startup on AIX-4.3.2)
Nathan@unos.net
Date: Fri Mar 03 2000 - 17:41:03 CST
On 3 Mar, Paul Rohr wrote:
> Nato,
>
> Did my reply to Caolan clear up your confusion?
>
> http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/March/0111.html
>
> Yes, we do want to take a stubs approach, leveraging and requiring a small
> set of XP libraries (like libjpeg) on a per-platform-basis where necessary.
I think I've got it. It sounds like we're in "violent agreement", as
you like to say. We're gonna build a set of wrapper functions, then
link to whatever functions are available for that platform at link
time, right?
> If I'm still confusing you, keep asking for better explanations.
The only thing that's still confusing me is why there seems to be a
great hesitation to link against ImageMagick. If we're going to choose
at link time, we could "prefer" certain libraries (like libjpeg or a
native OS call) over others, but still have several choices available
to us.
The only reason I'm "stuck" on this ImageMagick thing is it seems like
it would be a quick way to get us started. Since we're going to put
stub functions in the XP code and link in the platform-specific
functions at link time, why do we care if the platform-specific
functions come from libjpeg or ImageMagick or libc or wherever?
Or am I still not quite getting it? Are you saying that we'd take a
library like libjpeg, include it as part of AbiWord (by keeping a cvs
branch and requiring that the library be present, either from cvs or
somewhere else) and then make sure that library (libjpeg in this case)
is ported to all our architectures?
If that's the case, then how bloated *is* ImageMagick, really, compared
to libpng+libtiff+libjpeg+libungif+libpcx+libbmp+manipulation-libs?
We're going to need more functions than load/convert/save anyway.
Specifically, we need resize/scale/etc functions. We can get them from
gdk-pixbuf (I think) but the we need to port that to all our
architectures. Or we can get them from imlib or imlib2, but then we
need to port that to all our architectures. Or we can get them from
ImageMagick (I think - Leonard probably knows better than me) which is
ported to most of our architectures anyway.
Plus, our *number* of dependencies drops.
That just seems to be the "easy" way, and we can always re-code the
platform-specific implementations to link to whatever we want at
link-time later on...
> Paul
Have fun,
Nato
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