Re: TIFF compression support list

On Fri, 29 Sep 2023, frechefuchs via Graphicsmagick-help wrote:
>> GraphicsMagick can do.
>
> Now that I know that libtiff provides its own compression and sub-format
> code, I'm not sure any more if it's reasonable to expect, e.g.,
> --without-webp to disable TIFF WEBP support.  Support for the WEBP image
> format and the WEBP TIFF sub-format are maybe two different things.  If
> you're going to provide some more control over TIFF format support,
> maybe additional options --without-tiff-webp, --without-tiff-lzw etc.
> make more sense.  Don't know how much that complicates the build
> process, though.

The GraphicsMagick configuration is primarily regarding which external 
libraries/programs GraphicsMagick will use.  It has not been about how 
to try to control features in other libraries.  Such issues are 
normally controlled by the the GraphicsMagick command line, or 
programming APIs.

There seem to be quite a lot of outstanding feature requests, and bug 
reports already.

Our priority is necessarily about portability (reasonably available to 
all), security (not compromised by untrustworthy inputs), stability 
(does not crash and deals with errors in a useful way), and 
performance (is expedient and consumes a reasonable amount of 
resources).

If this was a company, it would be easy to find enough work to keep 16 
full-time people busy, but we are just a few volunteers who have day 
jobs working on totally different technologies.

It is easy to imagine a tiff-specific option to specify which codecs 
are allowed to be used when writing TIFF files. But then one would 
also want to be able to specify replacement codecs so that LZW changes 
to ZIP, etc.  The -define option could be used to provide inputs to 
that.  Or a new type of configuration file could be invented to 
provide coder-specific defaults.

What is needed are motivated volunteers to solve topics that they are 
interested in, and contribute the changes to the project.  It is not 
as difficult to program in C as some people imagine.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key,     http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt