Re: gdk_pixbuf::xpm_image_save patch

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Hans Breuer <hans breuer org> writes:

> > - The file open mode changes are probably OK; fopen (..., "rb")
> >   is standard ANSI unlike the horror of O_BINARY.
> >
> >I think that was all the other changes - if you make a patch
> >with just those and not the saving patch, it might be useful.

> Yeah. If you wouldn't mind I could even commit these changes to cvs
> myself.  I've got an account - mainly for my win32 Dia port. (It
> would be my first direct Gtk+ commit, but there are already some
> patches from me in the Win32 part.
> And I'm trying to make recent Gtk+ working again on Win32, which
> simply requires to build gdk-pixbuf first.

Well, once we agree on the change, I don't have any problems
with you going ahead and commiting, but I'd like to see another
iteration of the patch as a patch before you commit.

> >The GIMP's XPM plugin does handle saving. It does have the same
> >problem as mentioned above, but it at least gives the person
> >some more flexibility in using it.
> >
> >So this should be a good option on win32. I'm pretty certain
> >that some of the other image manipulation suites such as
> >netpbm have been ported to Win32 or at least to djgpp
> 
> although I wouldn't have netpbm called an "image manipulation suite" :-)

You can do some pretty powerful stuff with netpbm; I couldn't
count the number of things I've used it for.

[...]
 
> >> But aren't XPMs used as general image resource format in every *ix program.
> >> Do you think this would be replaced by inline PNGs in the near future?
> >
> >In GTK+-2.0, we have a special inline-rgb format and a utility
> >for creating these files; this probably will be the standard
> >for small images. (It isn't especially space-efficient, but
> >better than XPM and allows storing the image data in the 
> >read-only/shared storage)
> >
> Do you really think all the Gtk users will convert their XPMs to inlined PNGs?
> (Which forces just another tool dependency.)
>
> Are there plans to drop the XPM support in Gdk ?

We clearly need to maintain image loading in XPM format for backwards
compatibility, but I don't think that implies that we need saving
facilities for XPMs.

GTK+ isn't meant to be a 1-stop-shop for everything you might ever
possibly need as a GUI developer. The image support is meant to be
basically what you might need to use at runtime in a normal
application (i.e., not the GIMP). Which is:

 - Loading of a wide range of image formats
 - Simple saving.

After all, GTK+ doesn't come with an image editor either....
 
> Thanks again for the even faster response,

I guess this one was a little slower, sorry :-)

                                        Owen