Re: gdk-pixbuf external conversion?

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris kaplinski com>]

On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Ian McKellar wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 17, 2000 at 02:55:00PM +0200, Lauris Kaplinski wrote:
> > 
> > The screenshooter uses excellent application (convert?) to do all its
> > conversion. IMHO something such should be semi-standard part of gnome
> > itself, maybe as part of bigger file conversion framework.
> 
> No!
> 
> Down that path there is much pain and suffering. convert will sometimes
> halt indefinately. It also doesn't solve the right problem. If we adopt
> this then nobody will write loaders for gdk-pixbuf.

Yeh, but it is still nicer to have external app hanging, not library
itself. For external app you can have nice fork + SIG_ALARM routine,
saying nicely, if something went wrong.
I think, there should be extensive quality checking, before adding
loader to standard library - being loaded into app address space, these
can take down whatever. External app can be isolated much more nicely.
Also I see no reason populating gdk_pixbuf with tons of weird format
loaders, almost nobody uses and certainly nobody is interested in
maintaining. Yet the ability to read every available file format is
excellent goal - so there certainly is space for on-the-fly external
conversion utilities.
If convert is evil, then it should fixed, or new converter written.

> 
> Ian [whose system is often haunted by convert and xcftopnm processes]

Regards,
Lauris