GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 70221
Burn GIFs on www.gimp.org?
Last modified: 2005-01-26 11:40:07 UTC
I realize this is far from being important, however, as was pointed out , it looks a bit odd that a piece of free software like the GIMP uses a patent encumbered graphics file format predominantly on its web site. Should you decide you want to burn your GIFs, I would be glad to be of assistance. For instance, I could download the GIFs from www.gimp.org with wget, convert them to PNG and mail them to you.
Oops, I forgot to type something, and although it is not really important, it just looks weird in the report. :-) "as was pointed out" on the Usenet newsgroup comp.apps.graphics.gimp HTH, ;-)
Well, yes, something has to be done about all these GIFs... I was hoping that the new site design would be ready before anybody starts complaining about all these GIFs, but it looks like we are still several months away from having a new site. I will see if there is an easy way to convert the existing GIFs and to change some of the scripts that generate the images used in the headers to use indexed PNG instead of GIF (PNG without transparency, because there are still too many broken browsers out there).
I wgot the gifs from www.gimp.org, or so I hope because I somehow always manage to get something wrong with wget. Most of the images I found are transparent gifs and are best left alone (unless you want to replace them with white background opaque pngs). There were 5 gifs which could do with translation and they can be found at http://www.xs4all.nl/~collin/test/gimp_org_png/. HTH,
Hmmm... If we are going to replace www.gimp.org by a brand new site using a different structure and different images, I propose to mark this as WONTFIX. Do you agree, Colin?
I'd like to note that if you use an 8 bit PNG, IE will handle transparency fine. It just doesn't do translucency. Of course, translucency can be wrapped in with javascript in IE, but I've never liked that.
"Do you agree, Branko?" Well, it's your call. I don't know how hard or trivial it is to replace these images. Thank you for asking, but I don't think it is really up to me to say 'yes' or 'no'.
Oh, sorry about your name. I just realized now that I typed the wrong name there. I had just been talking with a colleague whose first name is Colin (single "l") and I guess that it stuck in my mind when I typed my previous comment. Please forgive me. Anyway, I think that I will leave this bug open for the moment. I am still not sure about when the new web site will be ready (I already added a link to it on the home page) and I don't know how the discussion on the gimp-web mailing list will evolve. So I will wait until I know a bit more before deciding if this is worth fixing or not. Thanks for your comments.
The LZW patent was supposed to end June 20th for the United States. If so, then that means we are no longer under licensing restrictions in the US. However, other countries still have about a year to go (so I heard; I don't know how accute that is), thus, I'm not sure how it applies to websites still.
The new website currently at http://mmmaybe.gimp.org/ uses PNG. Hopefully the switch to the new site will happen soon and we can close this bug report. If there is i a bug report tracking the new site this should be set as depending on it. Optimistically setting the target milestone to 2.0
I hope that we can switch to the new site soon after GimpCon. I still have an open action point to make the new pages work with older browsers such as Netscape 4, but I hope to be able to solve that problem this week (I just came back from vacation after more than three weeks without access to the Internet). It is unlikely that we will replace the existing images, since the new site provides new ones in PNG format (however, see bug #116523 where I mention 4 GIF images that should probably be copied over). Maybe we could mark this bug report as WONTFIX, or add a dependency to bug #116523 because of the 4 images that are used by many other sites.
I count 59 GIF images on the new site, all but one in the tutorials.
Setting milestone to future. Perhaps the web team should have their own module, given that they aren't really tied to product release numbers? Dave.
I'm in favour for an own gimp-web bugzilla product mainly for these reasons: - web bugs are unrelated to gimp bugs - the version numbers make no sense - the web team need components like "download" or "tutorials" to organize their bugs.
I'd like feedback from the web team (Raphael, Branko, brix, scizzo?, carol?), and then I'll clear this with Luis and create the module if everyone's happy. I'll need a minimum of components to create the project - afterwards if there's a need we can always add more. Dave.
Having a separate component would be OK for me, but then we also need to set up a mail alias for the default owner (such as web-bugs@gimp.org) and update a couple of links on the old and new web sites. So if you get in touch with Luis, I would like him to tell me when he thinks that he could create the new module and re-assign the bugs so that I can be prepared for this. Also, Yosh would have to add the new mail alias first (I would like to be on that alias; I don't know who else would be interested). Regarding the components, here is a suggested list with short descriptions: * General - Anything that does not fit in the other categories * Downloads - List of mirrors, contents of the ftp site, etc. * Mailing lists - GIMP mailing lists and their archives Most of the stuff would fit in General. I would refrain from creating more components for the moment (such as "platform-specific" or "tutorials"). We can always create them later if necessary, but I think that these three components will be sufficient for the limited number of bugs that we have now. More would probably just confuse the users (or us!).
As for when the module can be created, I can do that. It takes about 30 seconds. As to reassigning the bugs, it would normally be us who would do that. I would suggest adding everyone subscribed to gimp-web to the web bugs alias - or perhaps using the mailing list address as the default owner. I don't think we should put mailing lists and FTP mirrors under the realm of the gimp-web module though. Those are somewhat different issues, imho. Cheers, Dave.
They are tied to the release schedule to a certain extent. Whenever a release happens the content has to be updated to reflect the current stable gimp.
It would make more sense to move the ftp and mail issues to some component of a new gimp-web product than to keep them as components of the gimp product itself. The bugs related to ftp and mail are currently assigned to the www.gimp.org component. In addition, the list of mirrors is available on the ftp site (/pub/gimp/MIRRORS and /etc/mirrors) and also included in the downloads page on the web site, so they are related. I am the current maintainer of these files and I would prefer to have these issues tracked in the gimp-web module. As for the mailing lists, I think that many people would consider the list archives and the web-based subscription mechanism to be part of the "gimp web site" even if they are technically hosted on a different box. A crazy suggestion: what about calling the new module "gimp-web-ftp-mail"? ;-)
The gimp-web module will be created when you say you're ready for it. All I need is an e-mail address of someone with a bugzilla account (it an be a mail alias) to be the default owner of the bugs. I'll add the 3 modules "website", "ftp" and "mail". Perhaps the gimp-web mailing list should be the default owner? I don't think that web bugs will pick up a huge amount of traffic, but there may be spam. Give me the nod and I'll do this ASAP. Dave.
Hmmm... I would really prefer to have an alias as the default owner. Not the mailing list, because if some subscribers are annoyed by the spam, they might leave and it would be difficult to avoid the spam once the address of the list is used in many bug reports. The best solution IMHO is to create a mail alias such as "web-bugs@gimp.org" or "www-bugs@gimp.org". We could then put anyone who is interested on this alias. This alias should be created by someone who is root on wilber because the directory /etc/mail/lists/ is only writeable by root. As far as I know, that would be Yosh or Snorfle (Shawn Amundson).
Raphael, Would you mind taking care of this, please? And jsut add a note here when the alias is ready, and I'll create the module. Dave.
The mail alias web-bugs@gimp.org has been created by Shawn on the 31st of December. I am the owner of the alias file, so I can add volunteers as necessary. As I already wrote in a message to the list and to you, you can go ahead and ask Luis to create the new Bugzilla module with the three components "website" (or just "web"), "ftp" and "mail".
Changing all www.gimp.org bugs from gimp product to the gimp-web product, including old closed/fixed bugs, and reassigning.
Let's try to go back to the original topic: GIF images on www.gimp.org (the new site, now). On 2003-08-23, Branko wrote: > > I count 59 GIF images on the new site, all but one in the tutorials. Some of these GIF images have been replaced by PNG in the meantime, but there is still some way to go. The count is now at 45, or 38 if we exclude the ones in /images/old/ (which have to be GIFs) and the ones in the splash screen gallery. The remaining GIF images are all in the tutorials: mostly in /tutorials/Golden_Text/ and in /tutorials/The_Basics/.
The main culprits are still tutorials/Golden_Text/ and /tutorials/The_Basics/. The GIF images will be replaced whenever someone updates these tutorials. In the meantime, the GIF patent is not really an issue anymore so I will close this as WONTFIX.