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Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2017 19:24:20 +0000
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Subject: Re: ext/gd: support creation of animated GIFs
From: ajf@ajf.me (Andrea Faulds)

Hi,

Christoph M. Becker wrote:
> On 09.01.2017 at 21:19, Andrea Faulds wrote:
>
>> Would this opaque object still allow you to use an arbitrary stream of
>> your choice?
>>
>> Also, like with imagepng() etc., could you stream the output to uh…
>> PHP's default output stream? (I'm not sure what it's called. The thing
>> that `echo` goes to.)
>
> It would be possible to allow either a stream URL or a stream to given,
> what would fit to image(png|jpeg|…)().  However, these are "stand-alone"
> functions which close the stream when they're finished, while the
> animated GIF writing functions would *allow* the stream to be
> manipulated by the userland developer, even though I can't see practical
> reason to do so.
>
> And, of course, we could also let the functions accept NULL to directly
> write to stdout.  Passing in 'php://stdout' should have the same effect.

Alright.

>
>> If it does both, I don't have much objection.
>>
>> Mind you… is it really necessary to hide the stream from the user?
>> fopen() is not particularly hard to use, and there are (admittedly
>> niche) cases where you might want to handle the stream yourself.
>
> Are there really such cases?  Should we sacrifice the safety of internal
> stream handling to support some (hypothetical?) use cases?
>

In fairness, I'm not sure. I know animated GIF streaming has been tried 
before, though I doubt if it's actually used at all these days. A more 
reasonable case might be embedding an animated GIF in other binary data. 
But that's a hypothetical.

What is the actual “safety” gain of not using streams? That you don't 
need to use fopen() yourself? (PHP will close files for you.) I'm just 
not super convinced there's a need for adding this extra layer.

Thanks for your response.

-- 
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/