Re: [MacPerl-Porters] GD

[Arved_37@chebucto.ns.ca]

Quoting Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>:

> I've looked more into it, and it appears to me that the issue is LZW
> compression, which gd1.5 uses and gd1.3 does not.  GD.pm uses gd1.2, and I
> don't know what kind of compression it uses.  Boutell was concerned about
> possible legal problems even with the RLE encoding in gd1.3 (saying that
> there might be a problem using something that LZW decompressors can
> decompress), but I don't see that as a reasonable legal issue.
> 
> So the question, to me, is whether or not gd1.2 uses RLE or LZW, and what
> the author of GD.pm is going to do.
> 
Surprised he hasn't looked at other compression techniques. Flate, for
example.

Anyhow, if this is going to be an issue (and the Unisys patent on LZW has
been a problem for quite a while; hence the PNG format), maybe we should
consider porting/building something else. ImageMagick? Most of it (the
manipulation stuff) works just fine on MacOS. That way we provide more
capability than just GIF, also.

What do you think?

Arved


---------------------------------------------------------------
 This mail was sent through the Nova Scotia Provincial Server.
 http://nsaccess.ns.ca/mail/ (in development)

==== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
==== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-porters-request@macperl.org