I have packaged [1] vips and nip. The packages can be found on mentors.debian.net (details follow). All packages are lintian clean and were built in an up-to-date pbuilder environment. I have locally installed and tested the packages.
1. http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk The following introductory text, largely lifted from the vips web site, briefly describes the software: VIPS is a free image processing system. It is good with large images (images larger than the amount of RAM in your machine), and for working with colour. VIPS consists of two main components: an image processing library, and a spreadsheet-like graphical user interface, available in the nip package. The nip program is really quite remarkable, and has functionality unlike what I've seen any other packages. This is most certainly not just another image viewer or manipulation program. With this program, you can form complex pipelines of image operations using a spreadsheet-like user interface. The resulting images are updated dynamically as parameters are changed. One of the more interesting features here is mosaic assembly. I have used this successfully to create "seamless" scanned images out of parts scanned on my 8.5x11 flatbed scanner. Also, nip can work on very large images and is quite efficient. I was able to do manipulations on 9 300-dpi 24-bit color 8.5 x 11 images simultaneously without any observable lag. I have discussed my interest in packaging vips and nip for Debian with the upstream maintainers, who are enthusiastic about this possibility. There are packages for vips and nip for some other distributions including gentoo. An [2] RFS for this package already existed. I retitled the RFS to an ITP and posted a little bit of additional information. 2. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=188478 There are two source packages: vips7.8 and nip. The vips7.8 package creates four binary packages (shown here with their i386 names): libvips7.8-dev_7.8.14-1_i386.deb libvips7.8-doc_7.8.14-1_all.deb libvips7.8-tools_7.8.14-1_i386.deb libvips7.8_7.8.14-1_i386.deb The nip package creates a single binary package: nip_7.8.14-1_i386.deb The vips package has the version number built into the package name because it creates and installs a shared library. Unfortunately, the library version is 0.0.0, but the upstream maintainers have fixed this and are now using sensible shared library naming conventions. To my knowledge, they are not using versioned symbols, though I may take this issue up with them (particularly after this whole tiff fiasco). vips 7.10.0 is out, but it is considered a beta release. The upstream maintainers expressed a preference for having 7.8.14 packaged for Debian for now rather than 7.10.0. The new version of nip is now called nip2. It uses gtk2.0 instead of gtk+. I will package those in a few months when they are considered stable by upstream and have documentation. Clearly they will not be ready in time for sarge. I'm hoping someone will sponsor these packages and upload them soon. They need to be uploaded fairly quickly to make it into sarge. Any feedback on the packaging is, of course, appreciated so that if I need to make changes, there is still time. Since nip build depends upon libvips7.8-dev (which depends upon libvips7.8), a gap of a day or two should be left between uploading vips and uploading nip. A few final notes: I am on the [3] NM queue but have not yet been assigned an AM, so I have some time to go yet. I am currently maintaining the xerces packages (xerces23, xerces24, xerces25, and libxml-xerces-perl) as a member of the debian-sgml-xml group on alioth. I am listed as a co-maintainer of those packages, though I am presently the only person actively working on them. As for vips and nip, I am not associated with the packages in any way other than being a user. 3. http://nm.debian.org/nmstatus.php?email=ejb%40ql.org Thanks for your support. If no one steps up to sponsor these packages within a couple of days, I will ask two people who have sponsored uploads for me before, but I'm hoping someone who is interested in image manipulation software will take a look at these. I don't want to seem impatient, which is why I mention this up front. I'm only trying to act quickly because of the looming sarge freeze. :-) -- Jay Berkenbilt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.ql.org/q/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
