Proposed package DjVuLibre

[Joshua Daniel Franklin]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 11:45:06PM -0500, sourceforge@docbill.emailuser.net wrote:
> I propose adding a package, DjVuLibre, do CYGWIN.
> 
> I have been building DjVuLibre since creation under Cygwin, and finally
> decided to offer to maintain an official Cygwin package for distribution.
> 
> The proposed setup.hints file is:
> 
> category: Graphics
> requires: cygwin jpeg
> sdesc: "Compress and decompress graphic images and scanned documents"
> ldesc: "Compress and decompress graphic images and scanned documents
> to DjVu.  DjVu is a highly compressed storage format which can be
> served directly from your web pages.  See http://djvu.sourceforge.net
> for more information."
> 
> ....
> After reading the instructions for packaging, I have prepared the following
> files:
> 
> http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/djvu/djvulibre-3.5.10-1-src.tar.bz2?downl
> oad
> http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/djvu/djvulibre-3.5.10-1.tar.bz2?download
> 
> Please test them and let me know if this will be added to the CYGWIN
> distribution.

Bill,

Thanks for packaging up these tools. After your note about being confusing
by the X11 reference, I looked at the SF page more carefully and saw that
there are mostly CLI tools and so my non-X11 installation would be fine for
a review. 

A few thoughts:

1) The links above aren't directly to the files, they're to SF download pages. 
I know this and you know this, but other people might not know this.

2) The binaries do not have a ".exe" extension. This is necessary for them
to work on Win95/98/ME so unfortunately a showstopper. :(
(BTW, have you or anyone tested building on Win9X?) I don't want to get you
down, though--I definitely vote for this if the packaging issue is fixed.
(After 3 votes you win!)

3) Does the GUI stuff build if the user has QT installed, or just fail, or fail
horribly? You might see if anyone with kde-cygwin installed can build/use it:
<http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/> This is probably not necessary just to 
do a Cygwin release, but it would be nice to know (maybe in README).

4) (Also unnecesary) You might put a QUICK START on using the tools in your
README. Totally optional, but that's something I really like to see. 

5) I found this (in tools/*.cpp) interesting:

//C- | DjVu (r) Reference Library (v. 3.5)
//C- | Copyright (c) 1999-2001 LizardTech, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
//C- | The DjVu Reference Library is protected by U.S. Pat. No.
//C- | 6,058,214 and patents pending.
//C- |
//C- | This software is subject to, and may be distributed under, the
//C- | GNU General Public License, Version 2. The license should have
//C- | accompanied the software or you may obtain a copy of the license
//C- | from the Free Software Foundation at http://www.fsf.org .

Especially in light of this:

<http://www.geoplace.com/ma/current/1199an.asp>

And this from the README:

---snip---
Windows and Mac versions of the viewer/plug-in, as well as commercial versions
of the compressors and OCR engines are available from LizardTech Inc.. The
compressors provided here are slower, produce larger files, and sometimes
lower quality images than the commercial compressors, but they do the job.
---snip---

And in their official statement at
<http://djvu.sourceforge.net/lti-licensing.html>
My favorite parts:
--"LizardTech is committed to making an Open Source release of at least 
the decompression (or decoding) software"
--"[W]e will never enforce any patent rights we may have that are infringed 
by use of the LizardTech Original Code... We cannot guarantee that any 
particular modification or extension to the LizardTech Original Code is 
permitted without a patent license"

Translation: Let us lock you in to our proprietary, patent-encumbered format 
for encoding--we'll always let you look at your stuff (via our Original Code)
after we corner the market.

There isn't any real evidence that's their plan, of course, but patents make 
it look bad.  These patents AFAIK have nothing to do with Cygwin packaging, 
but it may be a good idea to mention any issues related to this in your 
README and/or announcement. 

Other than that, DjVu looks like an exciting and interesting technology. 
I have been involved with some digitization and honestly I'm suprised I
haven't run into this before. It would make things like the International
Children's Digital Library <http://www.icdlbooks.org> so much easier than
Adobe eBook Reader and Java is. 

One last thing: if I read correctly, there is currently no Free version of
the encoder that runs on a Microsoft OS, so I definitely support making this
little bit of Free Software available.