Re: pngcrush and bugs 331068, 338659, 355693, 352177, 330026

["Nelson A. de Oliveira" <naoliv@gmail.com>]

Hi!

On 3/24/06, Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Nelson A. de Oliveira wrote:
>
> > The 4 programs are similar, but different. They are small too.
>
> If there is no chance to unify these algorithms in one single
> program using different options (which would IMHO make perfectly
> sense) I would think about collecting the "needed" upstream
> programs in one single Debian package and fake a single program
> by a wrapper.  I guess this would work if we notice that each
> upstream is not that active that releasing one single upstream
> triggers many package updates.
>
> What do you think about this?

pngnq and pngquant are very stable. pngquant is from April 2002 and
pngnq from September 2004. There is no new version because their
upstream author said to me that their programs work and they didn't
receive any bug reports. But they are still active projects. If there
is a bug, they will fix.
I think that with pngnq and pngquant we won't have problem, since they
will release a new version only if there is a problem with the
program.

Merging pngnq and pngquant, on a single package, won't be a problem.
It's possible to have a wrapper and select automatically the program
that the user wants to use.
Something like
"pngfoo -newquant image.png" will call pngnq
"pngfoo -quant image.png" will call pngquant

They also share some source code, because one is based on the other.

optipng and pngcrush are more active. They release versions not just
if they found a bug, but they keep implementing new things.
optipng, for example, is going to have a new release soon.

The problem is that I think that it will be difficult to merge the 4
optimizers on one source code.
Merging them on one source package is easy. But I don't see too much
advantage on this.
The user will have a "pngoptimizer" program that will be a wrapper to
all the 4, if merging the 4 program won't be possible?

If we merge they, the user will use more space (well, today space is
generally not important).
If we fix just a line of code on one program, the user will need to
download a bigger package to fix this.

But one think that I see that is good is that we will have team
maintenance, right?

I still don't see good reasons to merge the 4 programs :-/

All the best,
Nelson