[Development] image format plugins

[Rutledge Shawn]

On Mar 19, 2015, at 21:57, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:

> On Thursday 19 March 2015 19:30:40 Konstantin Ritt wrote:
>> I didn't say we *should* do it. Simply asking for opinions.
>> 
>> There is no any single .ico file in qtbase (except of ones in
>> qicoimageformat auto-test) and we don't support -no-ico/-qt-ico/-plugin-ico
>> configure options, which makes it a good candidate.
> 
> There are plenty of icons on websites (favicon.ico), which is why the ICO 
> engine was placed in Qt in the first place. In addition, there's no third-party 
> library required, this is all Qt-based code. I don't see why it should be 
> disabled at all.
> 
>> There is also just a single .gif file in widgets/movie example, though we
>> support -no-gif configure option and widgets/movie example never checks if
>> gif format is really supported.
>> ^ So why bloating qtbase?
> 
> Removing the files will not make the repository smaller. The actual checkout 
> size for most people will also be the same, since we're not proposing removing 
> from Qt, just moving around.

Several years ago I started writing a giflib-based plugin with features that the existing one doesn’t have (to read and write text comments in the gif file was what I wanted, but probably giflib can do a few more things too).  If I was to get it integrated, where should it live?  It would need a config option, because of depending on a system library: the existing plugin is better if you don’t have giflib, or don’t want the dependency.