Executive summary: I've uploaded a new libtiff based on upstream's 3.9 branch to experimental. I believe it to be fully source and binary compatible with 3.8.2. Unless there are major problems, I will be uploading this version to unstable soon. There is no transition required, but I'm going through experimental since this is not an official upstream release. I would encourage people to grab the libtiff4 package from experimental and make sure all your applications that process tiff files still work as expected. Details: It's been over three years since the last upstream release of libtiff (3.8.2), and it's been over two years since the release of 3.9.0 beta. Even so, there is plenty of activity, and upstream has been saying for a long time that version 3.9.0 is just about ready to release. It has many bug fixes and many security fixes (all of which were already backported to 3.8.2 for debian). Although the 3.9.0 beta release itself was not binary compatible with 3.8.2, the problems that broke compatibility were fixed in CVS, and I have personally verified that the head of the 3.9 branch is binary compatible with 3.8.2. (I both checked the relevant source and header files and also ran several tests using various old executables loading newer shared libraries.) There are an increasing number of operations, including processing of files with "old style" jpeg compression, that don't work with 3.8.2 but do work with 3.9.0. Rather than continuing to wait for the upstream release of 3.9.0, I have decided to "roll my own" 3.9.0 release based on the current head on CVS. I follow upstream carefully and believe this is likely to be more stable than 3.8.2 in spite of its somewhat unofficial status. I mentioned to upstream that I intended to do this and will make sure they are aware of it before I upload it to unstable. In any case, if you maintain something that uses libtiff, I'd be grateful if you could test your packages using the libtiff from experimental. No need to rebuild -- just grab the libtiff4 package and install it. Everything should "just work". Thanks. -- Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>
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