2007.07.14 23:29 "Re: [Tiff] [ANNOUNCE]: Libtiff 4.0.0alpha released", by Jay Berkenbilt

As debian tiff maintainer, I just wanted to ask a few questions. Those not interested in how tiff appears in debian can delete now. :-)

We are glad to present a snapshot of the new libtiff branch 4.x. This is the first libtiff release supporting BigTIFF files. Significant efforts were made to keep source compatibility, so in most cases you just need to rebuild your application to get read support for BigTIFF.

As usual sources available from our FTP site:

 ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/pub/libtiff/tiff-4.0.0alpha.tar.gz
 ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/pub/libtiff/tiff-4.0.0alpha.zip

Release notes:

 http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/v4.0.0.html

I'm very pleased to see that the soname on the tiff library for this release is 5. This means that debian and other distributions that are using 4 for the soname of the 3.x series will no longer have to use a locally patched version once 4.0.0 comes out.

For the debian tiff packages, it is my intention to just package 3.9.0 once it is a non-beta release (though I will do some testing with the beta release). Then, when 4.0.0 is ready for beta testing, I'll probably prepare an upload for "experimental" so that people who maintain packages that depend upon it can do some of their own testing.

Rather than supporting two versions of tiff in debian, I would plan on replacing the 3.x series with 4.0.0 when it is released. Since there are binary incompatibilities, this would require a library transition. I would have no intention of trying to support both a 3.x version and the 4.x version in debian at the same time.

Does this sound like the approach that you would intend?

On the JBIG issue, I think it's pretty safe to say that the debian version of libtiff will not include JBIG support. I wonder whether there would be a way to make JBIG support available at runtime on platforms that support dynamic loading. In any case, I think the debian packages will just state that people who need JBIG support will have to build their own. I'll have to see what the project's position is. With the LZW and RSA patents now expired, I've lost track of whether there's any mechanism in debian for distributing patent-encumbered code. Once upon a time, there was a "non-us" pool for this purpose, but it no longer exists.....Anyway, this isn't the problem of the tiff developers, other than perhaps planting the idea that maybe this could be made available as a runtime-loadable extension. Just some thoughts.

I'll be looking forward to trying 3.9.0 and 4.0.0!

--
Jay Berkenbilt <ejb@ql.org>