Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] [patch] new package: freeimage

[Mark Brand]

>> All in all, that's too much trouble for such a small issue
>> that can't be overlooked, i.e. the build fails quickly, and
>> the failure points directly to the patching.
>>
>> The only problem here are patches via email, but that's easy
>> to solve: Just compress your patch (or hg export) with gzip
>> before sending it. I won't mind the extra "hassle" of unzipping
>> that file before I import it. ;-)
>>
>>     

Agreed.

>>> 3)  The FreeImage package contains the sources of many image libraries
>>>     which are already part of mingw-cross-env. Is it possible to make
>>>     FreeImage use those instead of baking its own ones?
>>>       
>> Perhaps these are modified sources or could become modified sources
>> without warning. I really don't know. This raises a philosophical
>> question. Would it still be FreeImage if we did that?
>>
>> Are there strong arguments for doing this?
>>     
> No, there are just weak arguments. I was mainly thinking of
> other packages such as wxWidgets or Qt, which also contain
> some other libraries, but we configure them to use the external
> libs instead.
>   

For Qt it's a configuration option offered by the package itself. For
FreeImage, we would need to create and maintain such an option. We'd
also be taking responsibility for possibly breaking something.
Applications would have to be modified to link to the individual
libraries. I'm inclined to leave the status quo alone. Do you agree?

> BTW, that's the fourth library of that kind. We already have
> SDL_image, GD and DevIL, which do roughly the same as FreeImage.
> It seems that image libraries are hip nowadays. ;-)
>   

I doubt we've seen the last of these either.

-Mark