From: Kenneth J. Davis (jeremyd@computer.org)
Date: Wed Oct 22 2003 - 09:11:22 EDT
On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:44:48 +0200 Hubert Figuiere <hfiguiere@teaser.fr> wrote:
HF> Hi,
HF>
HF> I'm about to tag 2.0.1 for public release. However I have a few wishes
HF> about how we should package it. Mainly for Windows users, but I think
HF> that even for UNIX other it should be done.
HF>
HF> Currently lot of people says: "your .doc importer sucks. I don't have
HF> images. etc." When looking closely at the guilty document, it appears
HF> that the document contains JPEG, WMF or BMP images embedded. Not having
HF> plugins installed will make these to be ignored, and users unhappy,
HF> which we don't like.
HF>
HF> So, what I'd like it that default installer for Windows, and packages
HF> for UNIX includes the following plugins:
HF> -BMP
HF> -WMF
HF> -JPEG
HF> I don't care which one is used, but we need the capabilities to decode
HF> these image fileformat.
HF>
HF> If you have any objections, feel free to speak up. I'm willing to delay
HF> the release for a few days if you need to make changes in the
HF> installer.
HF>
HF> Hub
I object to adding them to the installer. BMP is already there and
required, so my objections are about the other two. We don't yet
build the WMF plugin on Windows (at least I have yet to try it).
Any plugin that requires third party libraries (libwmf2 and libjpeg)
should not be added as a requirement for the installer to
succeed. If a user needs to support these image file formats, said
user should install the plugins! Otherwise why have them as a plugin?
WMF I could be swayed to adding as a build option, if someone makes
an argument similar to the one for BMP, i.e. some/most Windows apps
may expect others to support it. Either we add all plugins* to the
installer or we expect users to install the components they need.
A better fix instead of simply including the extra plugins would
be to notify the user when an image is encounterd that could be
supported, but isn't because the user has yet to install an optional
image importer.
Alternately, we drop the BMP plugin as a requirement and simply
add the ImageMagick plugin to the Windows build, then all the
image formats we possibly support on Windows are there with a
single plugin.
My opinion can be swayed or others can make the changes
for Windows (just don't break building abi core if the 3rd party
libraries don't exist so the plugins can't be built).
Jeremy
* Actually once 2.0.1 is released I plan on making a setup like
this also available along with the standard slim setup with plugins
in a separate package.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Oct 22 2003 - 09:12:38 EDT