Re: ImageMagick/Graphicsmagick

[Nicholas Wourms <nwourms at netscape dot net>]

fedora@studio.imagemagick.org wrote:

> Again, you have not investigating the best solution here.  You have
> made up you mind based on just a few criteria and you are shoving it
> down everyones throat.  Given your strong statements and clear unwillingness
> to discuss which project is best based on merit, don't bother replying.
> I will not waste anymore of the CYGWIN community's time on a dead subject.
> I will tell the CYGWIN community that ImageMagick Studio intends to 
> have full support of ImageMagick 5.5.7 and 5.5.8 Beta for CYGWIN and both
> source and binaries will be available on
> ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick.


I'm sorry but I don't like the potential ramifications if this were to 
happen.  Not that I really have any say in the matter, I don't, but I 
feel that others out there share some of the concerns I will mention.

Harold, you've earned every right to make this decision as you see fit, 
and I respect that, but surely some sort of compromise can be reached 
which will satisfy both parties?  The original author seems willing to 
work with your complaints if you are willing to keep an open mind.

However, the original author should realize that Harold has some valid 
points concerning the libtool versioning you used as well as hardcoding 
the version minors into the module directory paths.  In effect, this 
means that we'd have to make a new runtime package each time the 
subminor was bumped PLUS keep the existing packages to maintain backward 
compatibility.

On the other hand, I've not looked at GraphicsMagick, do they use the 
same names for includes, include-dirs, modules, module-dirs, & 
libraries?  If not, I can definitely see this as a PITA if you are 
building something which depends on the original names, since you'd have 
to tell it the new names and such.  However, if it does use the same 
names, then inevitably there are going to be many who get confused and 
unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) install both versions of the 
this software.  When dll hell starts to set in, they probably aren't 
going to e-mail either of you personally, rather they are going to flood 
our already high-volume main list with false "bug" reports and what not. 
 Plus, what if I or anyone else decide to package something which 
depends on the ImageMagick libraries?  Then we'd have to tell people to 
make sure they uninstall the author's version to be able to use my 
package, even if they preferred the author's version.  You can see where 
I'm going with this and the picture isn't pretty.

Cheers,
Nicholas