[PYTHON IMAGE-SIG] The PIL library -- specification for release 0.1

[Fredrik Lundh]

Bill Bumgarner wrote:

> 2) in regards to Leffler's libTIFF; i strongly disagree that a
> desirable solution would be to pull the useful decoding bits from
> Leffler's library and just use those.  This would incur MASSIVE
> down-the-road maintenance penalties-- every time Leffler releases a
> new version, the bits and pieces would have to be sucked from his
> code and integrated into the PIL... potentially hours of tedium per
> release with no real gain in the feature set (beyond the bug fixes
> provided by leffler).

Hmm. I don't really agree here...  Just a few comments:

1. PIL 0.1 already include TIFF/LZW, Packbits, and JPEG decoders.  I
have a Huffman decoder up my sleave, so what's left is Group 3/4 and
ZIP/Deflate (for which the specs are still changing).

2. We'll need good Group 3/4 codecs anyway to handle formats like
SPIFF, CALS, IIF, BIIF, NITF, etc...

3. A lean and mean distribution is worth a lot.  If I can replace 4000
lines of C with 200 lines of Python, I'll do it...

This is not to say that someone else couldn't provide a libtiff
interface for PIL, just that I will not place it too high on _my_
list.  There's simply to much else to do, like getting the first
release out of the door (I'm working on it right now :-)

	/F

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