On September 14, 2010 01:52:17 am Eric O'Brien wrote: > Hmm. would you please not top post and quote properly? I nearly hit the delete key and ignored your post, whose first five lines did not say WHOM you are addressing nor WHAT. Basic netiquette, please.
> I'm not buying in on many of your arguments here. I'm not selling anything. The software is Free. You're free. > I don't know enough about this particular change in Enfuse. Was the > decision to treat all pages of multipage TIFF files equally taken with > a clear understanding of the repercussions of that choice? First of all, those who made the changes don't have to justify themselves. Their sole obligation is to redistribute the source code, which they did. That said: there was a discussion. There was a (self-imposed) deadline and AFAIR the decision was to ship with Christoph Spiel's multipage processing and Thomas Modes' response file processing. We have been bouncing ideas forth and back about addressing individual pages but the problem is more complex than it seems on the surface and there was a conscious decision to ship 4.0 as-is. There was a clear understanding in the sense that we knew there were enough TIFF manipulating tools to ensure that input is validated upstream before being fed to enblend/enfuse. But of course "clear understanding" is *never complete* until the tool hits the wild. How should contributors who don't have access to OSX and don't use Canon's DPP or Adobe's LR (just three examples of many) understand the repercussions of that choice on files produced with those software? Looking back, I regret not pushing further on the idea of addressing individual pages via switches (I was just a tester on the matter), although probably it's better so: release often and release early is the best way to get some real life usage feedback and fine tune the next version. > Certainly it is not the case that all pages will always be of equal > importance to the user. And how is enblend / enfuse to know without user input? sure, we could add some heuristic, discard pages if they have smaller dimensions than other pages (assuming they are thumbnails, but who knows, they could be cropped / masked objects to be blended into the pano?) and do other tricks. No. It is up to the user to sort out what images are important before feeding them into enfuse/enblend. > And this decision sure has the flavor of an > enthusiastic developer implementing what they personally wanted/ > needed... without (sorry) "thinking about it a bit further." How come everywhere else it is "in dubio pro reo", and not in this case? why do you have to look for a problem with the programmers, while this is so obviously a user problem? > Programmers, especially programmers of Open Source tools, build things > that "ordinary people" (that is, non-programmers) will use. Over the > years, I have encountered far too many programmers who are very very > sensitive to having their work criticized. A reaction of "Go fix it > yourself!" is disingenuous -- ordinary users are *not* programmers and > can't fix it themselves. It is not my work that is being criticized and your preconceived notions are not applicable in this case. Note that there is no controversy about the merits of the feature request that has been filed six months ago [0]. So far nobody had time to dedicate to solve the problem, please respect that every contributor is the master of his time and decides how to use it. There are enough workarounds to make this issue not critical. If somebody makes a stink about using one of the many workaround proposed, the short-term problem lies between the headrest and the keyboard and nobody else can fix it but the consumer himself. You seem to have preconceived notions about programmers, particularly about Open Source programmers. You assume they build things that "ordinary people" will use. What makes you think so? Many Open Source programmers code to scratch their own itches. They don't give a damn what others will or won't do with it. If it's useful, good. If it's not useful, so what? It is their time, their effort, their rule. They publish back to comply with the spirit and letter of the Open Source license, and end up regretting it after they are confronted by hordes of thankless barbarians who point fingers at them for not having thought of problems that are not theirs. Has anybody here thought of pointing the fingers to the TIFF-producing tools? Why don't they give the consumer an option not to store the unnecessary pages? Oh, maybe there is such an option, and the barbarians just did not notice? There surely is tiffsplit, and while the long term solution will be some sort of control in enfuse/enblend that does not exist yet, those who refuse to use the workarounds suggested are the ones to blame, and not the programmers whose only fault is to go about their own business. Yuv [0] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2977905&group_id=123407&atid=696412
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