bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Xah Lee]

lmy ast message contain a little editorial mistake.

Xah wrote:
>. For example, Visual Basic and PHP today are perhaps the most used 
>languages if one count the pencentage of number of programers for these 
>langs.

I meant to say, yet these people downloads FSF's emacs for Windows, and 
there's no php mode or visual basic mode by default. To these poeple, "emacs 
sucks" right there.

This clause is just meant to support my view that DLL for images should be 
included. I don't mean to start to argue about why php mode or visual basic 
mode are not included by default or any philosophy.

This is probably my last message on this particular bug report. Thanks.

 Xah

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Xah Lee" <xah@xahlee.org>
To: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>; <4367@emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com>
Cc: <jasonr@gnu.org>
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2009 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image


> Hi Eli & other GNU Emacs developers,
>
> perhaps this is controversial... but doesn't FSF people want GNU Emacs to 
> be working out of the box on Windows?
>
> it is trivial to include the dll libs for images.
>
> The other recent bug is about ftp not working out of the box on GNU Emacs 
> binary for Windows downloaded from FSF site, whereas Lennart's EmacsW32 
> distribution includes a Open source ftp binary that fixed the problem.
>
> I feel that it would be great for all features of emacs work out of the 
> box as much as possible for platforms that are supported by FSF.
>
> Since FSF does develope a version of emacs that works for Windows... i 
> don't understand if there is a reason to not include these DLLs?
>
> The only reason i can think of is that perhaps FSF prefer emacs to be work 
> well for GNU/Linux and does not take extra steps to make it work as well 
> for “non-free” Windows. If this is the reason to not include image library 
> DLLs for Windows, i feel this perhaps damaging to the spread of FSF 
> philosophy, since many Windows people who tries emacs and just find it not 
> working in many situations. For example, Visual Basic and PHP today are 
> perhaps the most used languages if one count the pencentage of number of 
> programers for these langs.
>
> btw, I should mention this message is just meant to address this image dll 
> issue pertaining this bug report, not meant to argue about philosophy or 
> best approach to FSF philosophy. I feel that a binary version of Emacs for 
> Windows downloaded from FSF's official site and not able to open image 
> files is something like a show-stopper bug.
>
> Thanks.
>
>  Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
>
> ☄
> 

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Stefan Monnier]

>> . For example, Visual Basic and PHP today are perhaps the most used
>> languages if one count the pencentage of number of programers for
>> these langs.
> I meant to say, yet these people downloads FSF's emacs for Windows, and
> there's no php mode or visual basic mode by default. To these poeple, "emacs
> sucks" right there.

A php-mode would be most welcome, yet.  OTOH We positively do not want
to include a visual basic mode, tho.


        Stefan

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 02:54, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> A php-mode would be most welcome, yet.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PhpMode

Perhaps we could ask the maintainer of this one:
http://php-mode.sourceforge.net/

    Juanma

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Xah Lee]

Adding a bit argument about why i think it is critical for emacs to be able 
to open image files out of the box.

• viewing image files right inside emacs is very convenient, and a common 
operation. For example, for web developers, it is often needed to quickly 
see the image files, either in dired or with M-x ffap in inline images. Web 
app programers are today perhaps more than 50% of professional programers 
(or some large percentage.)

• I disagree about the argument that including DLL is too much work or 
problematic. For example, all popularly used emacs distros (Lennarts 
EmacsW32, Aquaemacs Mac, Carbon Emacs), all support viewing images out of 
the box. They mostly have just 1 core developer. If they can do it, GNU 
emacs with its tens of developers certainly can manage.

• perhaps there's licensing problem to include image DLL in GNU Emacs. If 
i'm correct, this might be because things bundled with GNU Emacs require 
signed copyright transfer agreement due to FSF's policy, or some complexity 
related to this. If so, i do think this is a problem that harms GNU Emacs. 
Again, if the issue of bundling image DLL for emacs does have something to 
do with licensing, then perhaps this licensing issue needs to be 
reconsidered. I'm aware this is a controversial and has been debated for 
long. I do not wish to suggest FSf people to re-exam old policies, but if 
this particular problem of not able to open image files in emacs out of the 
box is related to this, thus i mentions this.

• Considered from user point of view... if emacs does support viewing 
images, and does support Windows, then it must support it out of the box. 
For example, compare other successful Open Source projects, e.g. FireFox. 
They don't say: oh, including DLL is a problem, go use your OS's file 
management, or go follow these install and compile instruction on how to get 
it to work.

• Consider the related issue of emacs not supporting editing PHP or Visual 
Basic code. Consider this: average programer, hear that emacs is a great 
editor, she download it, and finds out it simply doesn't support 2 of the 
MOST popular languages. This alienates a big chuck of potential users.

Yes, FSF has a philosophy in supporting only Free Software. However, 
consider the user point of view again. In the 1980s and 1990s, where perhaps 
more than 50% of programers uses emacs. In those era, emacs works out of the 
box for what they need to do. This quality, helped spread GNU and FSF's 
philosophies. But, the computing landscape has changed a lot in the past 20 
years, and emacs does not work out of the box for most professional 
programer's needs today. For whatever philosophical or political problems 
today to include Visual Basic, this situation is a problem for emacs. If 
emacs still have a lot users, then it isn't a problem, but i think a 
verifiable fact is that, emacs's users among professional programers has 
reduced to something like 1%. (“professional programers” is here defined as 
those who's main income are from programing or sys admin.)

• The Visual Basic language is not philosophically in sync with FSF, but the 
Visual Basic mode is. So, whether to bundle the Visual Basic mode shouldn't 
be a problem if FSF is willing to consider effective ways to spread its 
philosophy by making emacs more usable for majority of professional 
programers on a practical basis.

Sorry if this report is tangential or perhaps not useful at all. But i tried 
to detail this specific problem of not able to open image files in emacs on 
Windows with reasons i think are pertinent that are mentioned by developers.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Xah Lee]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 451 bytes --]

attached please see a png image.

when in dired, press enter to open it.

it won't display as image, but displayed as text.

tested this by starting with -Q.

(was going to paste my M-x string here but noticed another bug that when 
actually in GNU emacs's Windows binary, however the version string pasted is 
from another emacs version that ran as server. will file another bug report 
on that.)

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄ 

[-- Attachment #2: Xah Obj Server texture.png --]
[-- Type: image/png, Size: 5006 bytes --]

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Jason Rumney]

Xah Lee wrote:
> attached please see a png image.
>
> when in dired, press enter to open it.
>
> it won't display as image, but displayed as text.

Works for me with GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2009-07-30 
on SOFT-MJASON

Perhaps you need to update your version of libpng?

> (was going to paste my M-x string here but noticed another bug that 
> when actually in GNU emacs's Windows binary, however the version 
> string pasted is from another emacs version that ran as server. will 
> file another bug report on that.)

Could it be that you are in fact using the version that was reported? 
Emacsclient doesn't care about versions, if it finds a server it will 
use it.

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Xah Lee]

sorry, previous report on this is a bit sloppy....

Now I realzied, that I was not able to open ANY png or jpg files. (if i 
realized this before, i wouldn't filed a bug report because that's prob just 
the way it is...)

This is:
GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.0.6002) of 2009-07-29 on SOFT-MJASON

on the other hand, i was able to open png or jpg files using emacsW32
GNU Emacs 23.1.50.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.0.6002) of 2009-06-30 on LENNART-69DE564 
(patched)

> Perhaps you need to update your version of libpng?

this is emacs on Windows... emacsW32 seems working fine.

Not sure what you mean updating libpng, since this is on Windows, i presume 
any png lib is included in emacs... or, humm... does this mean if i don't 
have libpng program installed separated on Windows then emacs won't open 
image files?

 Xah

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jason Rumney" <jasonr@gnu.org>
To: "Xah Lee" <xah@xahlee.org>; <4367@emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com>
Cc: <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 5:20 PM
Subject: Re: bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image


> Xah Lee wrote:
>> attached please see a png image.
>>
>> when in dired, press enter to open it.
>>
>> it won't display as image, but displayed as text.
>
> Works for me with GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2009-07-30 
> on SOFT-MJASON
>
> Perhaps you need to update your version of libpng?
>
>> (was going to paste my M-x string here but noticed another bug that when 
>> actually in GNU emacs's Windows binary, however the version string pasted 
>> is from another emacs version that ran as server. will file another bug 
>> report on that.)
>
> Could it be that you are in fact using the version that was reported? 
> Emacsclient doesn't care about versions, if it finds a server it will use 
> it.
>
> 

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Jason Rumney]

Xah Lee wrote:
> This is:
> GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.0.6002) of 2009-07-29 on SOFT-MJASON
This is the basic precompiled Windows binary.  It contains only Emacs 
and the libxpm library (this is an exception to the general rule that 
third party components are not included, since correct display of the 
toolbar and splash screen depends on it).

> on the other hand, i was able to open png or jpg files using emacsW32
> GNU Emacs 23.1.50.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.0.6002) of 2009-06-30 on 
> LENNART-69DE564 (patched)
That distribution of Emacs comes with a lot of third party tools that 
are useful alongside Emacs. Things like the image libraries, binaries of 
GNU find, grep, diff etc. If you still have that installed, adding the 
directory where all those tools are located to your system PATH will 
allow them to be used by both versions of Emacs.


> Not sure what you mean updating libpng, since this is on Windows, i 
> presume any png lib is included in emacs... or, humm... does this mean 
> if i don't have libpng program installed separated on Windows then 
> emacs won't open image files?

Yes. Suitable binaries for the image libraries and more are available 
from gnuwin32.sourceforge.net

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Xah Lee" <xah@xahlee.org>
> Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 20:32:37 -0700
> Cc: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> Not sure what you mean updating libpng, since this is on Windows, i presume 
> any png lib is included in emacs...

No, they are not.  The only image library shipped with the precompiled
binary distribution is libXpm, because without it you don't have the
color icons on the toolbar buttons.  The other image libraries need to
be installed separately.

> or, humm... does this mean if i don't 
> have libpng program installed separated on Windows then emacs won't open 
> image files?

You won't be able to see PNG image files in Emacs, yes.  And libpng is
a DLL, not a program.

See the value of image-library-alist for the possible image libraries
Emacs supports for each image type.  You need to have at least one
installed for each type, to be able to visit images of that type

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Xah Lee]

Hi Eli & other GNU Emacs developers,

perhaps this is controversial... but doesn't FSF people want GNU Emacs to be 
working out of the box on Windows?

it is trivial to include the dll libs for images.

The other recent bug is about ftp not working out of the box on GNU Emacs 
binary for Windows downloaded from FSF site, whereas Lennart's EmacsW32 
distribution includes a Open source ftp binary that fixed the problem.

I feel that it would be great for all features of emacs work out of the box 
as much as possible for platforms that are supported by FSF.

Since FSF does develope a version of emacs that works for Windows... i don't 
understand if there is a reason to not include these DLLs?

The only reason i can think of is that perhaps FSF prefer emacs to be work 
well for GNU/Linux and does not take extra steps to make it work as well for 
“non-free” Windows. If this is the reason to not include image library DLLs 
for Windows, i feel this perhaps damaging to the spread of FSF philosophy, 
since many Windows people who tries emacs and just find it not working in 
many situations. For example, Visual Basic and PHP today are perhaps the 
most used languages if one count the pencentage of number of programers for 
these langs.

btw, I should mention this message is just meant to address this image dll 
issue pertaining this bug report, not meant to argue about philosophy or 
best approach to FSF philosophy. I feel that a binary version of Emacs for 
Windows downloaded from FSF's official site and not able to open image files 
is something like a show-stopper bug.

Thanks.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>
To: "Xah Lee" <xah@xahlee.org>; <4367@emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com>
Cc: <jasonr@gnu.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2009 9:13 AM
Subject: Re: bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image


>> From: "Xah Lee" <xah@xahlee.org>
>> Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 20:32:37 -0700
>> Cc: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>>
>> Not sure what you mean updating libpng, since this is on Windows, i 
>> presume
>> any png lib is included in emacs...
>
> No, they are not.  The only image library shipped with the precompiled
> binary distribution is libXpm, because without it you don't have the
> color icons on the toolbar buttons.  The other image libraries need to
> be installed separately.
>
>> or, humm... does this mean if i don't
>> have libpng program installed separated on Windows then emacs won't open
>> image files?
>
> You won't be able to see PNG image files in Emacs, yes.  And libpng is
> a DLL, not a program.
>
> See the value of image-library-alist for the possible image libraries
> Emacs supports for each image type.  You need to have at least one
> installed for each type, to be able to visit images of that type

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Xah Lee" <xah@xahlee.org>
> Cc: <jasonr@gnu.org>
> Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:30:11 -0700
> 
> perhaps this is controversial... but doesn't FSF people want GNU Emacs to be 
> working out of the box on Windows?

Emacs works on Windows as well as it does on GNU/Linux.

> it is trivial to include the dll libs for images.

No, it isn't: there are various copyright issues, and sorting them out
takes effort.  Why bother if every interested user can easily download
these libraries from public sites, which are advertised in nt/INSTALL?

> The only reason i can think of is that perhaps FSF prefer emacs to be work 
> well for GNU/Linux and does not take extra steps to make it work as well for 
> “non-free” Windows.

Emacs does not come with image libraries on GNU/Linux as well.

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Jason Rumney]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> it is trivial to include the dll libs for images.
>>     
>
> No, it isn't: there are various copyright issues

I would hope not.

My reason for not including image DLLs with the official release are 
twofold:

1. The effort required to keep up with security bugs in at least 6 
different image related libraries, and to figure out how to get all of 
those libraries to compile on Windows (many other ports are not as well 
documented and maintained as Emacs in this respect).

2. The need to include a lot of third party source on the GNU ftp server 
- this may make it misleading as to the origin of that source, and may 
invite irrelevant bug reports.


I find it surprising that people have such strong views about the 
inability of a TEXT EDITOR to display various image formats out of the 
box.  We ship enough third party libraries for Emacs to display all the 
graphical components of its own interface, isn't that enough?

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Lennart Borgman]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:07 AM, Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org> wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>>
>>> it is trivial to include the dll libs for images.
>>>
>>
>> No, it isn't: there are various copyright issues
>
> I would hope not.
>
> My reason for not including image DLLs with the official release are
> twofold:
>
> 1. The effort required to keep up with security bugs in at least 6 different
> image related libraries, and to figure out how to get all of those libraries
> to compile on Windows (many other ports are not as well documented and
> maintained as Emacs in this respect).
>
> 2. The need to include a lot of third party source on the GNU ftp server -
> this may make it misleading as to the origin of that source, and may invite
> irrelevant bug reports.
>
>
> I find it surprising that people have such strong views about the inability
> of a TEXT EDITOR to display various image formats out of the box.  We ship
> enough third party libraries for Emacs to display all the graphical
> components of its own interface, isn't that enough?


Perhaps it would be good to include libraries that allows the most
common web image types (if that is possible)?

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Stefan Monnier]

> it is trivial to include the dll libs for images.

No it's not.  We've discussed it and decided not to do it.
But if you want that, there's the EmacsW32 package, which does it, IIUC.


        Stfean

bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Xah Lee]

for what's worth, here's the error generated when trying to open a png file.

File mode specification error: (error "Invalid image specification") [2 
times]

Note again, the problem is that i'm unable to view ANY jpg or png file, 
using GNU Emacs binary for Windows. Don't know if this is considered a bug 
or not...

 Xah