With respect to gif support - In php it is needed. This is not because you can't just as easily create png images, but because php is capable of opening and manipulating existing images. You could I suppose use gif2png to first create a png image and THEN manipulate it - but KISS applies. There are plenty of web apps out there that take an image uploaded from the end user sitting at home to do whatever they do - and a lot of those images will be gif images. Back in the php 4.0 days - adding gif support to php was as easy as patching gif support back into gd and then building php - it would detect the gif support and your gd module for php would support gifs. While speaking of gifs - LZW support should be patched back into libtiff if it hasn't already been - the upstream maintainer has a patch for that on his site. The gd developer seems to want nothing to do with gif - but some Ausie maintains a patch for gif in gd. I *think* new php won't auto detect gif in configure anymore, so that needs to be patched for php to have gif support. lzw is a good algorithm - it would be a shame if the bad blood from Unisys prevented its use now that the algorithm is finally free.
