[rrd-developers] Re: rrdtool and libgd

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 11:55:32AM +0100, Tobias Oetiker wrote:

> 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

This is honorable.

> 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.

Looking at the changelog, there are also a number of bugfixes, portability
fixes, better PNG support, etc.  I was not suggesting that rrdtool use JPEG.

> 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.

Yes, I noticed that.

> 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

Yes, thank you for this information.

> 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 ...

And so you should.  This modification is noted in the appropriate places in the
Debian package, so this should not be a problem.  I have gotten no complaints
as yet.

I don't see the point of ripping JPEG support out of libgd.  The reason I link
rrdtool the way I do is that Debian contains a package for the gd library,
version 1.8.4, as well as libpng and zlib.  It would be inappropriate to link
rrdtool with a different version of this library than the one used by the rest
of the system.

Actually, I have noticed that the old libgd package (with GIF) support has been
resurrected in a new package in Debian (with a different library name) to
support programs like rrdtool which require the GIF version of the library.  I
intend to link the next upload of rrdtool against this library, and restore GIF
support and compatibility with vanilla rrdtool.

-- 
 - mdz

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