Gdk-pixbuf 0.5.0 is released

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico helixcode com>]

Dear primates with overfeatured brains,

Version 0.5.0 of the almighty gdk-pixbuf library has been released.
This release is the result of many weeks of caffeine-enhanced hacking,
the zest of spicy foods, the excitement of moving across countries,
the adrenaline-inducing rush of fast machines, and obscenely cold
winters.

* Availability:

ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/gdk-pixbuf/gdk-pixbuf-0.5.0.tar.gz

* Changes in this version:

	- Support for GIF animations has been added.  We can even load
          animations progressively.  Thanks a lot to Jonathan for
          writing this; send a beer to this dude.

	- We now have some obscenely fast functions to do scaling with
          interpolation and composition of pixbufs.  On ix86 machines
          these functions will use MMX if it is available.  Owen
          deserves a beer as well for writing this.

	- New functions to convert Gdk drawable information to RGB
          format for pixbufs (Michael, Cody).

	- New BMP image loader for Windows bitmaps (Arjan).

	- New ICO image loader for Windows icons and cursors (Arjan,
          who deserves a beer as well for his excellent work on the
          loaders).

	- New PNM image loader (DrMike).

	- New utility functions for adding an alpha channel to a
          pixbuf and for extracting regions from pixbufs (Cody).

	- API fixes, correctness fixes, and performance enhancements
          for the GnomeCanvasPixbuf item (Larry, Federico).

	- Lots of fixes to the image loaders (Jonathan, Havoc, Arjan,
          DrMike, Mark, Federico).

	- Installation, versioning, and library separation
          enhancements (Elliot).

	- Miscellaneous build fixes and include file fixes (Raja,
          Havoc, Jacob, Federico).

The compilation of gdk-pixbuf now produces two libraries,
libgdk-pixbuf and libgnomecanvaspixbuf.  The latter contains only the
GnomeCanvasPixbuf item; it was made separate so that the brave hackers
who work on the HEAD branch of gnome-libs will not have symbol
clashes.  People who use the pixbuf canvas item in their programs now
have to pass an extra "gnomecanvaspixbuf" argument to the "--libs" or
"--includes" flags of the gnome-config program.

We would like people to test the animation code by feeding animated
GIFs into it, both the synchronous and the progressive loaders.
Please tell us if you find an animated GIF that gdk-pixbuf fails to
load.

We would also like people to test the drawable->pixbuf conversion
functions, especially on exotic hardware with uncommon visual/colormap
combinations.  If you have hardware that causes gdk-pixbuf-drawable to
fail, please send us the output of the `xdpyinfo' program.

The fast scaling functions have been written so that they will use MMX
instructions on ix86 machines that support it.  For other platforms,
they should use the normal C code.  Please tell us if this is not
autodetected properly on your platform.

Thanks a lot to all the hackers who made this release possible.

Enjoy,

  Federico