[CREATE] Status of libora?

[Jon Nordby]

On 23 September 2012 20:06, Jehan Pagès <jehan.marmottard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am new to this list, so I present myself. I am Jehan, developer, and
> lately working with an animator for an animation project.
> In this context, I have recently been interested into OpenRaster and
> decided to search if a library did already exist. I found libora, and
> actually already made my first patch there, as I could not compile it
> (bug 55246).

Hi Jehan,
thanks for your interest and the patch. I've pushed it to master now.

> But what striked me was that the repository has not been touched since
> November of 2010, so nearly for 2 years, and I see 5 other bugs,
> apparently untouched since their creation in 2011. But what scares me
> even more is that someone has even provided a patch on one of these
> report (more a feature, for a command line tool), and there has been
> no answer for a year and a half.
>
> Has the development been somewhat abandoned? What is the status?
> I would be interested into looking more into this library, and even
> fix what I can in it if I know that it will be integrated.

At the moment no-one is using libora, hence its lack of development.
All the applications that have read/write support of OpenRaster have
their own implementations, often written in more high-level languages
(Python, C#, C++). As simple as OpenRaster is at the moment, this is
often just as easy as using a C library like libora.

The only consumer I know is a very basic, and not really distributed
QImageIOLoader plugin (repo: qopenraster) that uses libora to attempt
to provide preview/render support for Qt based applications. The
problem is that libora can only render a very very small subset of
OpenRaster files correctly. Fixing that would require to do a lot more
work on the compositing in libora to support the various blending
modes that are specified. This is also the reason why it was not a
high priority to merge Davids patch on the bugtracker (we discussed it
on IRC, bad us). We should probably just put it in.

If you are interested in continuing to work on libora I'll review and
integrate the patches you provide, and give you commit access when
you've completed a couple.

-- 
Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com