Re: GIF without LZW

Stephen> But it's not going to be immediately available on any Stephen> platform besides Red Hat Linux, right? Debian Linux Stephen> doesn't seem to have it, anyway. Karl> It's there... I have it installed, though this XEmacs is Karl> linked against `gifreader'. It's not in hamm or bo. I assume that _you_ aren't running rexx. So you must be on the development branch.... If XEmacs is going to use it to avoid the patent issues that Unisys claims pertain to GIF READing, we need to be able to point to a readily available piece of software that we don't supply. Otherwise proceeding as we are now (including the GIF decoding capabilities via devilish code we know ;-) seems like the way to go. If we can't even say "it's readily available for your libc5 Linux system at a Debian/RedHat/Slackware/... mirror near you", what does that imply about *BSD, Solaris, HPUX, ...? (Even with autoup.sh, I don't intend to upgrade my students' mail server from libc5 to libc6 until I've got an alternative server ready to take over its identity.) The best we can hope for is that it will be as easy to use as GIFlib itself (not unreasonably, I think), but even without the patent question GIFlib itself was not entirely satisfactory IIRC, and Jareth ending up forking development there (although with hopes of quickly remerging, again IIRC). -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +1 (298) 53-5091