Fwd: [Libjpeg-turbo-users] jpeg-9, API/ABI compatibility, and the future role of this project

[Tom Lane]

Michael Stahl <mstahl at redhat.com> writes:
> read more carefully then: the git repo contains binaries built against
> different Ubuntu baseline versions, the older of which have jpeg6 and
> the newer jpeg8.

[ shrug... ]  So we'd be incompatible with some of them no matter what.
But the bigger point is that we can't let Ubuntu make decisions for us
about which versions of which packages Fedora is going to ship.

Personally I concur with Adam's newfound opinion that jpeg8 is a dead
end we shouldn't be going down.  The original point of libjpeg (which
succeeded beyond my wildest dreams really) was to promote universal
JPEG file compatibility.  The latest jpeg8 and jpeg9 versions are
antithetical to that goal because they create nonstandard files that
can't be read by standard implementations, including older libjpeg.
If there were a huge improvement in compression performance maybe
there'd be some chance of establishing a new de facto standard, but
there isn't --- so this will accomplish little except to fragment
the market.  I don't think Fedora should be contributing to that,
not even to the small extent of breaking ABI compatibility to be
ABI-compatible with those library versions.

			regards, tom lane
			once organizer, Independent JPEG Group