Re: Building AbiWord without libwmf and removing libwmf from Guix

[ng0 <ng0@infotropique.org>]

Ricardo Wurmus transcribed 1.4K bytes:
> 
> Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> writes:
> 
> > Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:
> >
> >> The last update to libwmf was twelve years ago, in 2005. In the
> >> meantime, a large number of security issues have been discovered in this
> >> library. These bugs are fixed somewhat haphazardly by the distributions.
> >>
> >> While working on patching CVE-2016-9011 in libwmf, and backporting fixes
> >> for CVE-2016-{9317,10167,10168} in the ancient bundled libgd, I find
> >> myself wondering if we need this library at all. The patches from this
> >> 12 year span of 3rd party fixes begin to conflict with each other...
> >>
> >> Libwmf is only used as a "plugin" by AbiWord, and AbiWord can be
> >> configured to build without it.
> >
> > What functionality would be lost?  I guess that AbiWord would lose the
> > ability to open some kinds of files, but it would be good to know
> > whether or not such files are still in common use.
> 
> WMF is the native vector format for Microsoft Office applications,
> according to Wikipedia, so this would probably affect the rendering of
> some images in Word documents that are opened with Abiword.
> 
> The format has continuously been developed, so it’s possible that libwmf
> (with a last release in 2005) isn’t even able to handle recent versions
> of WMF.
> 
> I think it would be better to remove libwmf.
> 
> -- 
> Ricardo
> 
> GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6  2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC
> https://elephly.net
> 
> 
> 

Libreoffice is able to do that aswell. It doesn't use libwmf, right?
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ng0
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