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

[Jack Twilley]

>>>>> "Curt" == Curt Mills <Curt> writes:

[...]

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

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

Not only do they change the API without notice, they do so without
incrementing any of the version numbers.  They suck.

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

"foo-config" is rapidly becoming the way of the future, and when it's
done right, it kicks butt.  They suck.

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

A decent quality assurance process would cure this.  Heck, we have a
better one informally:  before I check little things in, I make sure
that at least they compile; and before I check big things in, I make
sure that it compiles on multiple platforms and runs as expected.
They suck.

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

Are you sensing a trend here?

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

It's hard to find a specific version of IM that doesn't suck.

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

And for the next 'major' release, I'd like to see support for stuff
like IM, wget, etc., to be deprecated.

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

Thanks for the opportunity to rant a tiny bit.

Jack.
-- 
Jack Twilley
jmt at twilley dot org
http colon slash slash www dot twilley dot org slash tilde jmt slash