[squeak-dev] VM should use platform libraries where possible (was: 16 bit GIFs (was: A nitpick))

Nicolas Cellier nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com
Fri May 16 20:51:17 UTC 2014


2014-05-11 16:20 GMT+02:00 David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com>:

> On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 09:38:06AM +0200, Nicolas Cellier wrote:
> > 2014-05-11 9:18 GMT+02:00 Nicolas Cellier <
> > nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com>:
> >
> > >
> > > 2014-05-11 3:48 GMT+02:00 David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com>:
> > >
> > > On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 03:00:41PM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> > >> > There?s a related issue that could do with a fix sometime - the jpeg
> > >> library we used to make the jepegreadwriteplugin is out of date and
> Debian
> > >> (at least) considers that a security risk and thus they mangle the
> sources
> > >> to not use those file but link to the ?standard? library. Which
> > >> unfortunately doesn?t actually work within our plugin!
> > >> >
> > >> > Leaving aside the sheer rudeness of throwing unapproved ?patches?
> into
> > >> somebody?s code (without ever letting Ian know, for example) and
> resulting
> > >> in a broken function, I imagine that if looked into we would be able
> to
> > >> tweak our plugin code to actually work with the new jpeg library
> code. This
> > >> would be a Good Thing. If anyone knows enough about jpeg library,
> Debian,
> > >> blah blah blah to look into this then it might make a nice project
> that
> > >> would benefit the Raspberry Pi Scratch using world - several tens of
> > >> thousands of kids in the UK alone.
> > >> >
> > >>
> > >> This issue is tracked in Mantis 7539: "Plugins should use platform
> > >> libraries
> > >> where possible. Gentoo removed Squeak for this reason."
> > >>
> > >>    http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7539
> > >>
> > >> It was originally reported based on Gentoo rejecting Squeak, and it
> > >> affects Debian
> > >> and other Linux distributions that (quite reasonably) expect that
> > >> supported
> > >> applications should link to current versions of system libraries.
> > >>
> > >> If anyone is interested in working to improve this, please do. It
> would
> > >> be a great
> > >> way for someone to contribute a really useful update to the VM.
> > >>
> > >> Dave
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > > A general idea would be to proceed in two steps:
> > > -1) upgrade the library in squeak svn repository, so as to fix the API
> > > evolutions mismatch
> > > -2) provide a way to link to existing library (via cmake/configure in
> > > VMMaker and apt/rpm package dependency at distrib level)
> > >
> > > Good plan, but what are the starting points?
> > > Which library exactly should be used?
> > > libjpeg - http://sourceforge.net/projects/libjpeg/ - which is the
> > > successor of the library used in squeak is licenced GPL v2, should we
> taint
> > > the whole VM?
> > > There is also an opened issue (
> http://sourceforge.net/p/libjpeg/bugs/5/ -
> > > 5 years old!!!) telling it does not compile on win32 (not sure which
> > > compiler though, it might be MSVC only), so this might be a hurdle for
> step
> > > 1).
> > >
> > > So what is the plan in details?
> > >
> >
> > Maybe http://www.openjpeg.org/ is a better match, BSD license... But
> it's
> > huge.
>
> The Mantis entry has links to the earlier discussions, so there is a good
> summary of the issues there. I do not know what the detailed plan should be
> but I think that we need two things:
>
> 1) Some platforms, probably including some unix platforms, need to use the
> old jpeg library code that we keep in
> platforms/Cross/plugins/JPEGReadWriter2Plugin.
> This must continue to work for the platforms that require it.
>
> 2) Other platforms, especially Linux distributions, would prefer to link
> directly to the jpeg runtime library provided by the operating system.
>
> There should be no GPL issues because linking to a runtime libjpeg is no
> different from linking to any other runtime library on Linux.
>
>
Beware, this is why LGPL was created for, no?
But GPL is different from LGPL.
I don't feel like reading those licenses again, it's just too boring, so
someone should confirm that:
link with GPL and you become GPL, it's viral.


> It may be that the best way to achieve this is to provide different
> variants
> of jpeg plugin in VMMaker. But I have not looked at this in detail, so I
> cannot say what is the best approach.
>
> Dave
>
>
>
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