[CREATE] Status of libora?

[Jehan Pagès]

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 5:18 AM, Jon Nordby <jononor at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Thanks for both answer (Jon and Luka) and especially the reactivity.

>> 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.
>

I was kind of scared by the lack of activity, but your fast answers
"un-scare" me. :-)
I completely understand interest fading or other activities taking
over, as long as you still maintain by at least checking new patches
in. And apparently you do. That's good.

> 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.

Cool. I don't know if I'll clone the repo, or maybe simply send some
patches, if ever I have any to send.

While I am at it, I have a generic question about OpenRaster: what is
the "status of acceptance"? I know mypaint already has it as its
default format. But Gimp still has it as a very basic plugin
lacking features (I think you wrote it, so know that's not a critics
of the nice work done :p).
First test I did, I used groups of layers, and they disappeared in the ora
(though, after skimming through the spec, ora has group of layers:
stack element).
Do you know if Gimp developers plan to switch to ora some day to
replace xcf? That would be awesome.

What about the proprietary softwares (we all think of Adobe with
Photoshop, of course!). They will obviously not make it their default,
but do you know of anyone interested in the spec other than Free
Softwares, at least for secondary export format?
After all, you based on OpenDocument spec and mouvement, and it is now
even supported in Microsoft Word (and most proprietary text processor
softwares).

Also is the standards still evolving?
I would personally be interested into an animation extension. I see
there has been a "proposal" of just a few approximative lines. In the
context of our project, I would be happy to discuss it, extend this
and add a support to libora.

Jehan

> --
> Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com