[Xastir] The problem...again (Mandrake/ImageMagick)

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On 29 Apr 2003, Chris Williamson wrote:

> I tried compiling ImageMagick 5.5.6 from source and it had no effect.
>
> I am using Mandrake 9.1.

Any Mandrake 9.1 users that can help Chris with this ImageMagick
issue?

Chris, the ImageMagick libraries have been a bit of a problem for us in several ways:

1) They like to change the API (applications programming interface)
without notice, which breaks our ability to use it.

2) They use this whacko "Magick-config" script which is supposed to
give us the flags we need to use while compiling and linking.  Often
it gets things wrong, but that's currently the only way to know how
it is compiled.

3) Some versions of ImageMagick don't appear to link properly to
programs.  I've seen this mostly with Cygwin lately, and had to go
back to a much earlier ImageMagick to make things work.

4) There's been a real unwillingness on the part of their project
team (well, one in particular) to make changes to fix these issues.

5) Sometimes OS distributions install broken ImageMagick
implementations or forget to include the development files need to
compile programs against it.

That's a quick rundown on the issues.  I'm hoping the GraphicsMagick
project takes off, as one of their goals is a stable API.  Most of
the people on the GraphicsMagick project were developers on
ImageMagick, but they're forking the code in order to use a
different development/release strategy.  If it works out well, we'll
add support for GM as well as IM, so either will work, but prefer GM
if both are available.

I know that doesn't help you directly, but at least you know what
you're getting into now.

At times in the past I've had to snag earlier or later versions of
ImageMagick from the SuSE site (I run SuSE linux mostly) because the
version on the CD's was broken in some manner.  You might check for
slightly older or slightly newer IM files on the Mandrake site,
sometimes they're in contrib or update directories, or try
rpmfind.net (if you've already tried this, I apologize.  I can't
keep track anymore of all the email).

-- 
Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_ at tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
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