Re: Re: jpeg8 vs jpeg-turbo
Bill Allombert wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 08:55:28AM +0200, Ondřej Surý wrote:
> > P.S.: You still haven't answered my questions in the previous email. I
> > don't think they are unreasonable.
>
> Let start with the beginning:
>
> I became the maintainer of libjpeg62 in November 2001, the package having been
> unmaintained for 3 years. During the last twelve year, Guido has served as
> the upstream maintainer, helping me to deal with bug reports, providing patches
> to fix issues, and finally releasing libjpeg7 which included, inter alia, patches
> I wrote for the need of the Debian package (the DP xxx patches in the changelog).
> Guido also agreed to the release of libjpeg 6b1 which is libjpeg 6b with
> versionned symbols, which was needed to move forward with libjpeg7. Since the
> release of libjpeg7, Guido makes one release (minor or major) each year in
> January.
>
> During that time, it became obvious that Guido has a deep understanding of the
> libjpeg code and the JPEG technology,
What do you base this on? It seems nobody is particularly impressed by
his attempts to improve the format. Can you personally evaluate this, or
whose opinion do you rely on?
> and at the same time that the quality
> of libjpeg is very high (there have been no security vulnerability reported
> against libjpeg6b in 15 years. Compare that number to libtiff, libpng or even
> libjpeg-turbo.)
But it seems libjpeg6 was created by different people (though nobody has
clearly answered the question of who the maintainers actually are and
have been). So this hardly seems like an argument to prefer Guido as an
upstream, at most an argument to stop any attempts at further
improvement and just stay with the old code.
> On the other hand, it is also obvious that the libjpeg-turbo upstream does not
> have a full understanding of the libjpeg code, so we are better off with Guido
> as upstream maintainer.
Do you have some references for that "obviousness"? Other distributions
do not seem to consider it so obvious. And on the other hand, several
problems with Guido's work have been mentioned here (such as in Ondřej
Surý's mail you're replying to). While his positive accomplishments as a
maintainer don't seem all that many; much of the new work has been in
new extensions that are considered dubious.
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