From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: imagemagic in image-mode and image-dired-thumbnail-mode? Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 14:45:26 +0900 Message-ID: <87zjtos7ex.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <87a9lp8uxk.fsf@gmail.com> <87ehb1bbvf.fsf@gmail.com> <83ehb052k1.fsf@gnu.org> <8761wctq5i.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <834nbw4ehp.fsf@gnu.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1373867140 7177 80.91.229.3 (15 Jul 2013 05:45:40 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 05:45:40 +0000 (UTC) Cc: larsi@gnus.org, spinuvit@gmail.com, joakim@verona.se, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Eli Zaretskii Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Jul 15 07:45:40 2013 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1UybbN-0002T9-I7 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 15 Jul 2013 07:45:37 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:38089 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UybbN-0000xj-7p for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 15 Jul 2013 01:45:37 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:46016) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UybbJ-0000xc-DO for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 15 Jul 2013 01:45:34 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UybbI-0008Cv-BX for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 15 Jul 2013 01:45:33 -0400 Original-Received: from mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.224]:43300) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UybbG-0008BK-9G; Mon, 15 Jul 2013 01:45:30 -0400 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) by mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0A3329709A2; Mon, 15 Jul 2013 14:45:27 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id C2A9315805A; Mon, 15 Jul 2013 14:45:26 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: <834nbw4ehp.fsf@gnu.org> X-Mailer: VM undefined under 21.5 (beta32) "habanero" b0d40183ac79 XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6.x X-Received-From: 130.158.97.224 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:161896 Archived-At: Eli Zaretskii writes: > > Eli, are you proposing to do the work yourself? > > You know very well that if I did, I would not be speaking here, but > instead coding and committing. Really? Given several people who are interested in this feature although unable to do significant work on it at the moment? I didn't realize you were an advocate of "last commit wins". ;-) > I don't disagree with the principle, but the results are evidently not > very satisfactory. Image libraries suck, that's part of life. How many PNG crashes and GIF crashes have been fixed upstream? How many of these libraries have undocumented restrictions on arguments or image formats that people have had to guess at over the years? How many more of those undocumented restrictions will have to be deduced in order to add features like scaling, one at a time? I don't know the details, but I can tell you that over the last ten years, as far as those affecting XEmacs go, the answers are "lots", "all of them", and "dunno, but past experience doesn't allow me to be optimistic". One advantage to using a higher level API such as ImageMagick's is that somebody else takes care of that. Assuming they do it well, of course. The PDF crash is one strike against ImageMagick, of course, but PDF is hard. So hard that Adobe wontfixes crashers in Acrobat they themselves confirm (of course, only in cases where Adobe software happens not to produce the dangerous expressions). One was so bad it sometimes blue-screened NT. > > XEmacs did try the same strategy with ImageMagick and abandoned it > > (too unstable, too many undocumented crashers) -- but that was over > > ten years ago. Surely ImageMagick has improved over the years. > > Evidently, the improvement is not enough, see the rest of this > thread. AFAICS, there are serious bugs in PDF handling. Screw you very much, Adobe. What else can we say about that? If Emacs wants to use a different library "just for PDF", that sounds reasonable to me. But that's an issue with PDF in general, not really one with ImageMagick. AFAIK, no matter what PDF library you use[1], Adobe's next release is a loaded gun at your head. With respect to the other issues that remain, as I wrote before, I suspect that they are mostly cases where somebody in a hurry to commit something cool didn't bother with the full ImageMagick API and left other cool features unimplemented. That's life in a project with no formal review process. > You didn't mention scaling, which seems to be the trigger for this > thread. Other people mentioned it, so I didn't think I needed to. :-) Footnotes: [1] Among the more-or-less standalone libraries. I imagine the ones used by KDE and GNOME are pretty stable but bring in huge dependencies.