On 29/08/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/29/07, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
I think the point Mark was making was that a wrapper around ImageMagick is capable of doing all these things.
Definitely.
We don't have to integrate this at all.
True.
Picnic's solution is horrible and proprietary,
It's "proprietary", yes, and closed source at that. What's "horrible" about it, though? It's a lot nicer than the GUI we were just comparing it to.
The fact that it's proprietary.
and not something we want to commit ourselves to implement support for,
Who is "we" and "ourselves"? If someone wrote an integration patch for it, would that be accepted into the mainline? Would it be enabled for Wikipedia?
The lead developer has, I believe, previously commented on the issue, and expressed an opinion that an open-source solution is far preferable, so the answer is "probably not".
An integration patch for this almost certainly wouldn't be accepted into the core software.
not least of all because the MediaWiki community as a whole will roundly reject it.
Why would they do that? Do we have a rule against integration with proprietary software?
Because the community to which I am referring is one of those great "open source" communities, which thrives on sharing techniques, code, extensions - I'm talking about everyone else who uses MediaWiki, excluding Wikimedia.
So, as before, our choices aren't really between integrating with Picnik or doing it ourselves, because the latter option is unlikely to actually happen. The more feasible choice is between integrating with Picnik or doing nothing at all, and having no online image manipulation. Which do you think is preferable?
Which do *I* (and, if I may be so arrogant as to presume, a good many others) find preferable? Rolling our own solution.
Rob Church