ImLib Bug:27995

[Andreas Tille <tille@physik.uni-halle.de>]

On Mon, 26 Oct 1998, Brian Almeida wrote:

> Could you provide more info on what you are trying to do? This is what I heard
> from Shaleh about what goes on with Imlib. I'm not sure what your problem is?
I reported about this problem in Bug#27995 which you can read in the Debian
Bug repository.

To use some other words if this is not clear:
Imlib can load (at least seven if I remember right) native image formats,
which are: PNM, GIF, TIF, PNG, JPG, XPM and EIMs (may be there are more?). 
These formats are loaded using self written routines (PNM, XPM, EIM) or
the appropriate libraries lib[un]gif, libtif, libpng and libjpeg.
If somebody tries to load a file with a different format it uses a
so called callback mechanism which opens a helper application (convert
from imagemagick or some helper from netpbm and some more obscure things),
which converts the file into pbm and pipes it to the ImLib routine.

To get this working at compile time ImLib obtains the path to this
helper applications.  For instance configure looks for the path of
convert from ImageMagick and stores this in the variable CONVERT_PATH.
If you obtain the ImLib sources and call convert; make all works fine
if ImageMagick is installed.

I havn't checked the package rules file to know how the maintainer
walked around this.  He decided to make ImLib independent from
ImageMagick (I think this is a wrong decition but it's not my part
to judge at this) and so CONVERT_PATH was not used.  So far so good.

BUT if somebody has installed ImageMagick (and which image processing
user don't do that?) ImLib doesn't work despite the fact.  "convert"
COULD be found at the system, because it exists, baut it ISN'T found
because the CONVERT_PATH variable wasn't set.  This is a bug regardingless
it is good or not good to make ImLib independent from ImageMagick.

The solution could be:
1) set CONVERT_PATH by hand to the well known location at a debian system 
2) make ImLib dependent from ImageMagick (many other programs are
   dependent and so it is not a big deal!!)
3) ask "The Rasterman" to leave out the CONVERT_PATH variable and
   relay on the "convert" program found in the PATH (But for sure
   he has reasons to go this way!!)

Hope that makes the problem clear.

Kind regards

          Andreas.