Re: Dropping 'fringe' pixbuf loaders

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Tue, 2015-09-22 at 01:20 +0200, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Mon, 2015-09-21 at 18:38 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>
> > wrote:
> > > On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 1:01 PM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>
> > > wrote:
> > > > Do we trust this code or not? If not, we should either a)
> > > > sandbox
> > > > it or b) delete it.
> > > >
> > > > Moving less-trusted loaders into a separate repo is a blame-
> > > > the-
> > > > user or blame-the-os-vendor move, depending on who installs
> > > > them
> > > > onto the system.
> > > The only way to prevent the blame game you mention in a typical
> > > distribution where everything is installed through packages would
> > > be to stop supporting out of tree modules entirely, if I
> > > interpret
> > > your concern correctly.
> > >
> > > My point is that as long as that's the case, at least maintaining
> > > them in a central location gives people an aggregation point for
> > > fixes.
> > But they are not being maintained by anybody, and the fixes have
> > not
> > been aggregating... every few years some security researchers
> > decide
> > to have a look at image loaders, and then we get a bunch of
> > overflows
> > and corruptions reported, and either me of Benjamin grudgingly fix
> > them. And both of us are tired of doing that.
>
> I would argue that at least I have taken care of some of that work at
> the end of 2014. I didn't get to see coverity scans or cppchecks, but
> this isn't the most complicated code to fix up and review.
>
> If removing some of those loaders helps lighten the number of
> potential
> bugs, sure, go for it.
>
> As for removing those loaders, I'd double-check whether GIMP has
> native
> support for those (not through a gdk-pixbuf loader), so that at least
> some modicum of support is left for those, making it less likely that
> we'll crash when somebody has a duff file in their file manager.

I tested all those formats, and I think we can remove the PCX and TGA
loaders, and leave those to be loaded by GIMP, in the very short term.

For QTIF, either support in GIMP or in GStreamer (it's usually only
used along with QuickTime) would be fine.

ANI files really need to be supported by GIMP before we remove the
support for it.

In short, remove all the mentioned modules, except ANI, and file bugs
against GIMP/GStreamer for the unsupported ones.

Cheers

Supported by GIMP:
PCX [2]
TGA [2]

Unsupported by GIMP:
ANI [1]
QTIF [3]
WBMP [4] (display broken in gdk-pixbuf)
RAS [5] (broken/unsupported in gdk-pixbuf)

[1]: Tests in shared-mime-info and gdk-pixbuf
[2]: Tests in shared-mime-info
[3]: https://github.com/daeken/QtChaos/blob/master/Harnesses/Quicktime/Sample.qtif?raw=true
[4]: http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/wap_images.shtml
[5]: http://samples.libav.org/image-samples/sunrast/