[Typo3-debian] GD with GIF support: Apache segfaults

[Michael Stucki]

Hi Scott,

>> I'm really interested to hear some real arguments
>> against PNG (seriously!).

> No version of IE, incluing 6, properly handles PNGs with either
> animation or transparency.  If you want to use a picture with
> either transparency or animation on your web site and ensure
> that it will display properly in all modern browsers, .gif is
> the only format to use.

Animation:
I think Typo3 can't produce animated images, so this may be a downside of
PNG but wouldn't touch Typo3.

Transparency:
I found this status report on the libpng homepage:
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html#msie-win-unix

I agree, this may be bad. I never used transparent PNGs yet, so I didn't
know about this yet.

> Microsoft said they'd add .PNG support to IE4.  It's REALLY
> annoying that they still haven't follwed through properly.

Good to see that it's primarly the Microsoft browser who isn't capable of
doing such things - once more ...

>> - We want to have Typo3 be part of the official Debian one day

> So why not have typo3-nonfree package (alongside gimp1.3-nonfree,
> etc)?  The precedent is definitely there.

Actually this has nothing to do with Typo3! It's just a whole replacement
for ImageMagick and libgd2. You could also use them with any other program.

>> - Debian doesn't accept LZW-Support (=GIF compression) because of its
>>   license restrictions. Search Google to read more about this topic.

> It's not an issue any more in the U.S.  And, in another year or so, the
> problem goes away entirely:
>     http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/lzw/
> (yes, I realise that Debian is global.  But, it might make sense to
> prepare...)

Where would you host this? Remember, it has nothing to do with Typo3. And
it's still being patented outside of the US.

> It's easy enough to get imagemagick to support lzw [1].

I already knew about that one.

ImageMagick can gain LZW-features by simply recompiling the package.
For libgd2, this would be much harder to do. The reason for this is that new
GD libraries needed to be patched because they have no more LZW-related
code inside.

Anyway: Did you ever wonder why nobody provides the lzw-enabled libmagick
for download? I do, and that's why I will not be the guy who dares to host
these packages as the legal situation apparently still seems to be very
unclear.

> But, do you know how to get libgd2 to support gif?  I couldn't figure
> it out.

See above.

Cheers - michael