On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 10:50 -1000, Warren Togami wrote: > Michael A. Peters wrote: > > Can we replace libungif with giflib in fc5? > > > > The LZW patent is dead, Unisys specifically says so on their website. > > > > The current version of gd shipping with Fedora now supports gif. > > The cvs version of gnuplot now supports the gif terminal type again > > using the gd library. > > The libtiff library in fc4 now has lzw patched back in. > > > > I've been using giflib on my system since fc3 (removing libungif and > > installing giflib in its place, with the shared library symlinks going > > the other way) and there are absolutely no issues. > > > > I'll file a bugzilla on libungif for it, I think I might have already in > > the past - but are there any other reasons anyone can think of for not > > going with giflib? > > > > giflib is available from same sourceforge location as libungif and being > > maintained in parallel with libungif. I'm guessing it is only a matter > > of time before libungif disappears. > > > > http://sourceforge.net/projects/libungif > "A library for reading and writing gif images. The save functionality > uses an uncompressed gif algorithm to avoid the Unisys LZW patent. This > library is based on Eric Raymond's giflib and implements a superset of > that library's API. " > > This and other hits on Google indicate that libungif has some exported > functions that giflib lacks. Are you sure this is a perfectly safe > drop-in replacement? There are not a whole lot of details on this website. The history of libungif and giflib is that GNOME 1 (via imlib) began to use giflib for its GIF support. Red Hat and other distributions realized this would cause problems due to the Unisys LZW patent. I found a posting that showed how to create uncompressed gifs that wouldn't invoke the patent (Unisys patented the encoder and combined decoder+encoder... Not a standalone decoder) and created libungif as a drop in replacement for giflib to circumvent the patent issues. As time went on, bugfixes and a desire for new features led to a need for API/ABI changes. I sent fixes and enhancements to Eric Raymond to coordinate a release so we could continue to have compatible libraries. He wasn't interested in maintaining giflib any more so I took over maintenence of that. The sourceforge page reflects that libungif is a superset of esr's giflib but not the present sourceforge hosted giflib. I'll go carify the web page now. -Toshio
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