[dev] Collaboration for a common EXIF library

[Andy Staudacher]

Hi,

I'm a developer from the Gallery.sf.net project and 'yunosh' contacted us
recently to see whether there is mutual interest in a collaboration to
maintain exifixer, an orphaned open-source project that is key to EXIF based
features in ansel and in gallery.sf.net.

I'm glad to report that our team would welcome such a collaboration.

Yunosh suggested PEAR as a common code repository to maintain exifixer. That
works for us.

More about the modalities:
- We would all profit from bugfixes from each other.
- Gallery.sf.net would continue to fix things as needed, but there would be
no active development for exifixer from our side.

The reason for the latter is that we're not happy with exifixer's codebase
at all.

We were aware that exifixer is unmaintained and we planned to evaluate
alternatives anyway. Meanwhile, we added some patches to exifixer in our own
codebase.

Our own agenda for EXIF based features includes:
- Enable writing of EXIF data via exiftool and other exif libs
- Evaluating alternatives (robustness, features, active development, ..)
-- PHP EXIF Library (PHP 5 only, we'd need a PHP 4 compatible port)
-- PHP JPEG Metadata toolkit
-- Perl's exiftool (very robust) - We successfully compiled a binary, so
it's callable without the perl interpreter via exec. But we'd always need a
PHP alternative (exec is a heavy dependency)
-- PHP's native exif extension (can't require this dependency either though)

So if there are plans for active development, I suggest that there should be
more evaluation since other projects might be a better base.

Independent of that, I think that moving exifixer to an open code repository
is a good idea and helps everyone.

If we move exifixer to PEAR, we should also contact the original author (and
copyright owner) such that everyone is on the same page.

Regards,
Andy Staudacher (nickname: 'valiant')