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Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:16:42 -0500 (CDT)
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Subject: gd development as part of php.net
From: boutell@boutell.com (Thomas Boutell)

Unfortunately there hasn't been any movement on this since I handed
it over to Pierre in April.

Obviously, since I sat on PHP myself for a really long time, I am not
pointing the finger at Pierre here. I'm still the champion
gd-neglect-ster by a LONG shot.

However, I'm wondering if anyone else is eager to help him make a
new release of gd happen as part of the PHP project.

If necessary, I could go looking for a new maintainer again, though
that surely wouldn't be fun and I'd prefer almost anything else. (:

* * *

On a related note, I'm wondering why PHP doesn't seem to have any
official relationship with the ImageMagick project - Which offers
an unofficial PHP extension of its own.

Though gd has been good to me over the years, I'm not going to sit 
here and pretend gd has a modern graphics API. It doesn't. gd has a
very 1989 API, full of integer-oriented assumptions and
less-than-smooth implementations of graphics primitives, written
by a guy with no formal background in graphics algorithms (me).
And that's always going to be visible in the quality of its output,
short of a total core rewrite and API redesign.

The good thing about gd was always the simple API - but a simple
API at the C level doesn't necessarily help anymore when the
end user isn't coding in C anyway. And ImageMagick has a 
floating-point, vector-oriented API that can do a whole lot more.
With a coder-friendly "MagickWand" API that gives it simplicity
approaching gd, especially when used from languages like PHP.

Also, the ImageMagick license appears to be GPL-compatible
and making-money-compatible:

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/license.php

So, at the expense of my own site traffic perhaps, why the outdated
gd API and not ImageMagick in the official PHP builds?

--
Thomas Boutell
Boutell.Com, Inc. 
http://www.boutell.com/