[dev] Collaboration for a common EXIF library

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Andy Staudacher <andress at ee.ethz.ch>:

> 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.

Great!

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

I'm fine with this, but would personally rather maintain it on  
pear.horde.org. It's not a problem to give commit access to whoever is  
working on it, though.

> 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.

Sure, that can be part of the discussion and could be a migration  
path. There isn't really an API to speak of to maintain compatibility  
with in exifer, anyway...

> 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.

Yup. Not to mention doing the PEAR proposal, etc...

-chuck

--
"we are plastered to the windshield of the bus that is time." - Chris