2023.06.14 13:47 "Re: [Tiff] libtiff 4.5.1 is released", by Bob Friesenhahn

I am guessing that pretty much nobody wants to use these any more, and that anything that needs to be done can be done by ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick or some such, and thus this is not a big deal, impacting perhaps only a few people, perphaps no actual people, running very old scripts. Is that a fair characterization?

It is likely that the tools which will be removed are indeed used by many people, even if they are not aware of it.

Most of the tools to be removed are highly optimized for what they do, but the original implementation code was not written in a secure way. The libtiff project has not had the resources (volunteers) with the time to re-write the tools to be secure. Meanwhile security alerts are continually raised regarding the tools.

The current list of libtiff tools may be found at https://libtiff.gitlab.io/libtiff/tools.html and out of this list, it appears that only tiffinfo, tiffdump, tiffcp and tiffset will remain.

Maintainers of operating system distributions or proprietary systems should take a close look to see what impacts there are. For example, perhaps the printing subsystem depends on some of these tools.

Bob

Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt