Re: names of programs

On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Jim Hettmer wrote:

>    If I am misinformed about this then I apologize in advance.  What I hear is
> that GraphicsMagick intends to use "convert", "display", etc. for the GM
> equivalents of these ImageMagick programs.  After nearly 40 years in the
> business of contributing software to computer communities and helping people
> get started, I can only urge that some other choice be made.  "gmconvert", or
> something.  Otherwise it just confuses people, plus it's a loss-of-information
> kind of like giving copied files today's date, that invariably ends up creating
> problems for everyone.  Since both are evolving software with differing

I agree.  That is why installation of these names is a
user-configurable option which defaults to *off*.  It is really only
of value to those who want to use GraphicsMagick with other
open-source or proprietary software which hard-codes its use of
ImageMagick commands.  There is a lot of open source software which
invokes "convert", "mogrify", or "montage", since ImageMagick has been
around since 1991.  These programs don't know about "gm convert" or
"gmconvert".  They only know "convert".

If an end user builds from source and they need these command names,
yet don't want to install a separate ImageMagick then they have the
freedom (as a user) to choose to enable use of the compatibility
aliases.

I don't recommend that anyone use this option while building a binary
distribution package for Linux or *BSD since that would be unfair to
ImageMagick and cause the problems you describe.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected]
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen



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