[Xastir-Dev] Introducing GraphicsMagick Project (fwd)

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

This is good news for us!  Item #4 on the list the most important to
me at the moment.

-- 
Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_ at tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math!"
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates!" -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2003 17:06:13 -0600 (CST)
From: Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us>
To: magick-users at imagemagick.org, magick-developers at imagemagick.org
Subject: [magick-developers] Introducing GraphicsMagick Project

At the end of November, 2002, Cristy (principle author of ImageMagick)
decided to make ImageMagick a personal project again, as it had been
from 1991 to 1998. The ImageMagick project is still open source, but
is maintained and developed by Cristy. The other existing ImageMagick
maintainers had no intention to stop participating in the development
of ImageMagick-related software, so "GraphicsMagick" (see
"http://www.graphicsmagick.org/") was created from a mirror of the
ImageMagick CVS repository.  GraphicsMagick is a friendly branch from
ImageMagick, with the understanding that GraphicsMagick should not be
confused with ImageMagick, and the GraphicsMagick install will not
conflict with ImageMagick.

The objectives of GraphicsMagick are to:

  o Use an open development model.
  o Encourage new developers to join the project.
  o Avoid unnecessary source code "churn".
  o Establish and preserve a stable API.
  o Use efficient coding practices which result in fast code.
  o Improve memory efficiency.
  o Use a release process which assures a working product.
  o Maintain an accurate ChangeLog.

Since the end of November 2002, the GraphicsMagick team has been
quietly preparing GraphicsMagick.  It has been a lot of work, but it
has been worth it.

GraphicsMagick is now ready for evaluation and testing by a larger
group of people. Snapshot source packages and Windows binaries are now
available from "ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/snapshots"
and anonymous CVS (see "http://www.graphicsmagick.org/www/cvs.html")
access is enabled. We are hoping that many of you will test
GraphicsMagick, and ensure that it works well for your purposes.

GraphicsMagick mailing lists are available via SourceForge at the URL
"http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=73485". Please feel free to
subscribe to these lists and discuss GraphicsMagick.

GraphicsMagick is a separate project from ImageMagick so please use
the GraphicsMagick mailing lists to discuss GraphicsMagick, and report
GraphicsMagick bugs to the GraphicsMagick bug tracking system rather
than the ImageMagick bug tracking system.

Thanks,

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen