On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 20:37:32 MST, Ben Wing said: Gaak. ;) Every time a problem is found in some package or other, we get to play "who linked their own frikking copy in" for everything on the system. zlib was stable for a long time too - and when a hole was found in that, everybody and their brother had to upgrade because they were carrying their own zlib along rather than using a shared lib... And everybody who drags their own libtiff along is having a bad day right now.... If we feel a need to drag our own Xpm along, at *least* make configure prefer the system version and/or require a --enable-own-xpm-libs flag of some sort.

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 (15:18 -0000 UTC) Aidan Kehoe wrote: Mac OS X 10.3 (at least) uses /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.4.dylib (compatibility version 4.11.0, current version 4.11.0) Which is part of the X11 distribution. Mine was updated with the Xorg 6.8.1 install, but the Apple X distribution also includes it. What is generally not that up to date on the Apple system is gmp, intl, ncurses, png, and jpeg. However, all of those are supplied, just in earlier or patched for security versions. -- rdr

Ben> It took me quite a lot of effort to get XEmacs to compile Ben> under VC++ 7; I'm surprised I haven't heard more complaints Ben> about this. I'm not; I would assess that it's just another symptom of the extremely low rate of contribution from Windows-based users. Ben> Anyway, one of the nastiest parts was recompiling Xpm. Ben> Xpm-3.4k has been frozen for years. I suggest we just Ben> incorporate it into XEmacs as a subdirectory, so that we can Ben> depend on it always being there. Comments? xpm2png everything is a better idea. Eg, GNU uses pbm or ppm instead of xpm for practically everything now, I believe. Is there any reason that's not feasible? -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

Ben> You mean GNU Emacs? Ben> Do they handle translation of pbm or ppm internally, without Ben> the need for external libraries? This would be ideal, Ben> esp. if pbm/ppm are simple enough that a Lisp program can Ben> generate a new one out of text (I think this is indeed the Ben> case); Yes, they do PBM internally, but it looks like they don't do PPM at all. GNU's color icons are all in XPM. (They do duplicate the icons used by tree-widget.el in PNG). I don't see that PBM is a huge win over XBM, which I assume we already do internally for Windows. I don't think there are any pixmap formats that are simple enough to do internally (except maybe Windows BMP, which I know nothing about). The problem is that there are just too many ways to tweak pixmap representations, and people want the formats they use to handle several varieties. Ben> I really hate the idea of depending on external libraries for Ben> necessary functionality. I think that's awfully extreme. XPM has always been a hairy icky thang epitomizing the whole X11 swamp, but libpng, netpbm, libjpeg, and zlib are pretty bullet-proof and have been stable for years. Ben> If all this is true, I'd suggest just copying the GNU code Ben> and doing the same switch. -0 (== I'm unfavorable and won't contribute effort, but won't veto.) -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.

I would agree. The only good thing about XPM is that programs can generate them on-the-fly; but that's not a good enough reason to use it by default. Comments?