ImageMagick/Graphicsmagick

[Charles Wilson]

Igor Pechtchanski wrote:

> No, Bob did not "chime in".  He was specifically Cc'd on the list to ask
> his opinion on how to best structure the ImageMagick packages given an
> obvious (and already discovered by the time he was contacted) problem with
> shared library naming.  Why he was contacted instead of you is on Chuck
> Wilson's head -- my guess is because his name was sprinkled all over the
> ImageMagick ChangeLog/CVS log relating to the build process. 

Two reasons:
   1) I'm the maintainer of libtool for cygwin.  Bob is one of the 
official upstream maintainers of libtool.  During summer 2002 and up 
thru November 2002, I was working with Bob on fixing some libtool issues 
-- and his "test bed" for these *libtool* changes was the ImageMagick 
codebase.  In retrospect, it seems that this was BEFORE GraphicMagick 
forked -- so I presume that at THAT time, Bob was a "developer in good 
standing" with the IM team.  I gather, tho, now that I've scanned the 
relevant mailing lists, that even then there was some discord developing.

   2) Some time later, Bob emailed ME privately asking about the 
procedures for contributing a package to cygwin -- something called 
"GraphicsMagick" that *I* believed was an addon to ImageMagick.  Bob 
specifically asked about "do I need to also contribute prereqs".  The 
answer, of course, was "Yes, all official packages may only depend on 
other official packages."  and I never heard anything on the subject again.
   I assumed that IM was a prereq for GM, and that Bob was unwilling to 
provide IM as a package, just to enable him to provide his "add-on" GM 
package.  I viewed this as a fairly sane decision since IM (and GM, of 
course, now that I've learned that it is a fork of IM) are each a 
gigantic beast of a package...

   So, when a question arose concerning IM, libtool, library versioning 
issues, and packaging it for cygwin -- of course I thought of Bob.  (Why 
would *I* take it upon myself to go ask the upstream IM maintainer 
something?  That would've been stomping all over Harold's turf!  But I 
*could* go ask *my* contact, with whom *I* had worked on IM 
previously...  I had no knowledge of the fork, or the dispute that 
caused it, at the time)

--Chuck