2007.01.15 17:22 "Re: [Tiff] bigtiff", by Frank Warmerdam

 >Joris writes:

Like I said, there is one point where I don't agree with Frank. I think it *is* too late to change BigTIFF design. The discussions ended over two years ago, and that's how long the 'proposal' has been up there for

Albert Cahalan wrote:

I think this proves my point. People wanted this over two years ago. Clearly the spec has been overly difficult to implement and/or just not all that desirable.

Albert,

The current BigTIFF specification is quite easy to implement (beyond the fact that TIFF itself is fairly complicated). The delay is that the libtiff developers didn't have the time to commit to the task, and because so many applications depend on libtiff it is important that the migration be done carefully.

I would agree that even changing BigTIFF now would take quite a bit of knashing of teeth since at least one codec has already implemented the BigTIFF specification. Changing it now would be pretty nasty. Nevertheless it would get ten times harder to change after libtiff with bigtiff support has been distributed.

I can see some desirability in your alignment suggestions, but this was never an excercise in fixing everything we don't like about TIFF.

Best regards,
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