The technical committee was asked in #717076 to decide whether
libjpeg8 or libjpeg-turbo would be the default libjpeg implementation.
The decision is below:
==== RESOLUTION ====
Whereas:
1. There is a dispute between Developers about whether libjpeg8/9 or
libjpeg-turbo should be the default libjpeg implementation in
Debian. The release team does not want to have more than one
libjpeg implementation.
2. The Debian libjpeg8 maintainer does not see libjpeg-turbo as a
suitable replacement, and notes that it does not implement the
full libjpeg8/9 ABI.
3. libjpeg8 adds new features to the JPEG image format. These have
however been rejected from the ISO standard, and their
contributions to image quality and compression appear to be widely
disputed.
4. libjpeg-turbo is reported to have significantly better performance
than libjpeg, and to be API/ABI-compatible with libjpeg6b.
5. libjpeg-turbo is in use by several other distributions (at least
Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Ubuntu) and browser projects (WebKit,
Blink, Gecko).
6. The former organiser of the IJG advised Fedora of his opinion that
libjpeg8 was a "dead end" due to fragmentation.
7. The libjpeg-turbo packages in Debian are not yet in a state where
they could be a drop-in replacement for libjpeg8. However,
similar work has been done in Ubuntu and could be adopted.
8. In general it does not appear that other Debian packages require
the libjpeg8 API. The sole exception appears to be a "decode from
memory buffer" interface (jpeg_mem_src/jpeg_mem_dest), which is
implemented by libjpeg-turbo unless configured
--without-mem-srcdst.
9. While libjpeg-turbo can be configured with support for much of the
newer interfaces in libjpeg8, it does not support the SmartScale
API. However, images with this extension may have
interoperability problems. Those developers advocating
libjpeg-turbo generally suggest disabling the libjpeg7/libjpeg8
APIs there.
Therefore:
10. The Technical Committee resolves that libjpeg-turbo should
become the libjpeg implementation in Debian, using its power
under 6.1(2) to decide on technical matters of overlapping
jurisdiction.
11. The prospective libjpeg-turbo maintainer should propose an appropriate
transition plan for this change, and, after a reasonable period for
comment, prepare tested packages for upload. The transition
plan should state the timescales for the relevant changes.
12. Implementing the decision in 10 above will require removing
"Provides: libjpeg-dev" from libjpeg8, since such a virtual
package must be provided by only one real package at a time.
Therefore the Provides should be removed from the libjpeg8
package - in accordance with the transition plan -
notwithstanding the libjpeg8 maintainer's preference that
libjpeg8 should remain as the default libjpeg. This change
should be made by the libjpeg8 maintainer; if the change is not
made within a reasonable time it should be done in an NMU by the
libjpeg-turbo maintainer.
==== END OF RESOLUTION ====
Please see http://bugs.debian.org/717076 for discussion of
this bug.
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