[rrd-developers] Re: rrdtool and libgd

[Tobias Oetiker]

Yesterday Matt Zimmerman wrote:

 | RRDtool currently ships with an ancient (about 1.5 years old) version of gd,
 | apparently in order to continue to support GIFs (this code was removed in gd
 | 1.6).  Many enhancements and bugfixes have been made in gd since that time, but
 | rrdtool has failed to benefit.  Is there any reason that rrdtool should not be
 | adapted to use the new version?  The loss of GIF support is not a problem in
 | many environments.  Indeed, I have been compiling rrdtool against libgd 1.8.4
 | for the Debian rrdtool package since its inception (patch attached...basically
 | uses PNG by default and disables GIF creation).
 |
 | If GIF support is truly an issue, conditional code could be included to support
 | GIF if it is available in the version of libgd being used, and otherwise
 | support only PNG (or more; the latest libgd also supports JPEG and WBMP).
 |
 | Note that the attached patch makes no attempt to do the right thing if the
 | caller asks for a GIF.  The switch statements that have been modified do not
 | have a default: clause, so unknown values aren't checked for either.  This
 | should be fixed.

there are several issues:

1.) in the 1.0.x series I am not going to braek compatibility. This
    means GIF support can not be dropped

2.) the main improvements in gd asfahr as I can see it are the
    addition of new image formats and truetype support. Truetype
    support is not used in rrdtool so this is no issue. And JPEG is
    not a suitable format for the type of graphics rrdtool produces
    ...  jpeg is for photographic images where the compression
    degradation does not hurt the overall image impression too much
    ... for rrdtool charts, using jpeg would be a crime against
    quality.

3.) the version of gd used in rrdtool has been modified to NOT
    contain any unisys compression code at all not even the image
    decoding code contained in the original 1.3 version.

4.) For the 1.1.x (development series) I plan to move up to a newer
    version of libgd or maybe even use imagemagick code for antialiased
    drawing ...

hope this helps

In other workds, if you send a patch which adds the gif support
back into 1.8.4 (not using lzw) and producing a lean and mean libgd
with no superfluous image format support (jpeg especially), I will
be glad to add the patch and upgrade to 1.8.4

Further if we get any debian users complaining about rrdtool not
being able to generate gif images I will be glad to refer them to
you ...

tobi

 |
 |

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