Could Tk::PNG be packaged by Stephen or the Debian Perl team ?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>]

Hi all,

I am maintainer (and in this case also author) of smtm, a 70kb Perl/Tk script
that acts as a stock market ticker. It also has a useful chart mode where is
simply display the variety of charts available at finance.yahoo.com by
downloading them and putting them into a Tk::Photo widget. For more, see
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/smtm and the screenshot page linked there.

Now, it would appear that as of a few days ago, Yahoo! pulled the plug on gif
files and started to provide png instead. Nominally, that is a good thing
given the various gif woes but in Tk, png is a second-class citizen and not
"natively" supported, whereas gif is.

All it takes, though, is the Tk::PNG module by Nick available at

   http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/N/NI/NI-S/Tk-PNG-2.005.tar.gz

along with a two-line patch (one line for 'use Tk::PNG;' and one line to set
'-format => "png"' instead of gif).

Given that Tk::PNG is tied to Perl-Tk and Perl releases, it seems prudent to
have this maintained by the Perl-Tk maintainer, or the Perl team.  I could
maintain it too, esp. as it seems low maintenance (last release in Apr 2000
(!!))  but am generally under too many packages as it stands [1] and would
loathe to have the package slip.

However, to keep smtm useful, I need a 'libtk-png-perl' package so if Stephen
or the Perl group declines, I will maintain this.

So: any interest anyone ?

Please do CC me on replies as I am not subscribed to this list.

Thanks, and best regards,  Dirk



[1] DBD::ODBC and Finance::Streamer are up for adoption is someone is interested.

-- 
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he 
predicted yesterday didn't happen today.  --  Laurence J. Peter