Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
The history of libungif and giflib is that GNOME 1 (via imlib) began to
use giflib for its GIF support. Red Hat and other distributions
realized this would cause problems due to the Unisys LZW patent. I
found a posting that showed how to create uncompressed gifs that
wouldn't invoke the patent (Unisys patented the encoder and combined
decoder+encoder... Not a standalone decoder) and created libungif as a
drop in replacement for giflib to circumvent the patent issues.
As time went on, bugfixes and a desire for new features led to a need
for API/ABI changes. I sent fixes and enhancements to Eric Raymond to
coordinate a release so we could continue to have compatible libraries.
He wasn't interested in maintaining giflib any more so I took over
maintenence of that. The sourceforge page reflects that libungif is a
superset of esr's giflib but not the present sourceforge hosted giflib.
I'll go carify the web page now.
-Toshio
Thanks, OK great. It would be helpful if you could provide a proposed
.src.rpm replacement for download and peer review to this list in a way
similar to an Extras package review request. That way folks here can
test it and suggest other improvements while we follow the process for
replacement in Fedora Core.
I suppose we want both Obsoletes and Provides of the N-V-R of libungif
and also matching -devel?
Warren Togami
wtogami(a)redhat.com