As the lead developer of ImageMagick I would like to clear up a few misconceptions being stated on this list.
How many developers have you still got? There doesn't seem to be much evidence of other developers on the project anymore.
1. Harold L Hunt II says: This package [GraphicsMagick] will replace
ImageMagick for various reasons. One of those reasons is that the
GM folks are committed to provide ABI stability and proper version
numbers, whereas IM is not making such a commitment and has already
made various arbitrary changes to ABI version numbers.
We had a discussion on the cygwin-apps mailing list; unfortunately, the discussion might not have always had ImageMagick in the subject, so you might not be able to find all of the messages. The gist of the discussion was that, regardless of stated intentions, the way that ImageMagick was handling ABI version numbers was going to cause problems on Cygwin. Someone else can pipe in with the details if you ask again, but I was satisified with the results of the discussion.
This is something Bob Friensenhahn is trying to convince people of
but it is simply not true. http://studio.imagemagick.org/ states
our project goal of: ImageMagick's focus is on performance,
minimizing bugs, and providing stable APIs and ABIs. Bob Friensenhahn
does not speak for ImageMagick. He tends to diminish ImageMagick in
various mailing lists I assume in order to promote his ImageMagick
clone project, GraphicsMagick.
Are we not adults capable of making our own decisions? Bob had nothing to do with this discussion and he has nothing to do with the fact that there is a problem with the way that ImageMagick is handling library version numbers.
2. Daniel Reed says: GaphicsMagick is a feature-for-feature
replacement of ImageMagick. This is simply not true. GraphicsMagick
is missing many features that ImageMagick has and if you run
a program or script against the two you will in many cases get
different results.
Hasn't been a problem for us so far. If you want to prove us wrong, you'd better be prepared to submit some step-by-step examples of how to generate such cases and describe why the differing results are meaningful. Assuming that you do that, why should we care? We've only had the ImageMagick package for less than a month and, quite frankly, it is easier to maintain the GraphicsMagick package because the build files don't create empty directories that I have to go back and delete by hand, among other things.
3. Daniel Reed says: I considered ImageMagick's to be votes for
GraphicsMagick. Why vote at all if you are going to usurp the votes?
A vote for ImageMagick should remain with ImageMagick. If you want
votes for GraphicsMagick have a separate vote.
Nope. I packaged ImageMagick, then I found GraphicsMagick and was convinced (by the code, not rhetoric) that it is superior for our purposes. I will not continue to package ImageMagick; I will only continue to package GraphicsMagick.
Don't come down on Daniel, accusing him of usurping other people. I announced that I was pulling the ImageMagick pacage and would be replacing it with a functional equivalent named ImageMagick. He handled the votes according to my announcement.
If you choose to support GraphicsMagick instead of ImageMagick, fine. However, base your decision on facts, not misconceptions.
No misconceptions here. The real problem is that some of this discussion took place under subject lines like "Re: Pending Package List ...", I believe. The history is covered in our mailing list; our search engine doesn't find it, but Google might. Happy reading.
Harold
