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Libtiff goes offline

madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com

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Re: Libtiff goes offline

#11

Post by noobermin »

For important projects like this (libjpeg, libpng and others) it would make sense if there was sort of place to get all of them apart from mirrors.

What am I saying, that place[0] exists. Developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of hosting their code if they don't want to or don't wish to weather the expense. It certainly seems in this case they couldn't pay for self-hosting (or friend-hosting or whatever this is). I do suppose it is difficult to move development to a new system though(CVS to git).

[0] https://github.com/

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#13

Post by Mizza »

noobermin wrote: post #11

For important projects like this (libjpeg, libpng and others) it would make sense if there was sort of place to get all of them apart from mirrors. What am I saying, that place[0] exists. Developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of hosting their code if they don't want to or don't wish to weather the expense. It certainly seems in this case they couldn't pay for self-hosting (or friend-hosting or whatever thi…

GitHub will rot some day as well. (I think we're already seeing it start to decline.)

This is simply a permanent problem. Archive.org and to a lesser extent IPFS are viable solutions for archiving, but _contingency_ plans are I think the missing component here. Pray for the best but prepare for the worst.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#14

Post by maxxxxx »

banachtarski wrote: post #7

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

TIFF is still used a lot in photography.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#16

Post by alrs »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #2

Seems like it's time to host it on a DVCS service so the problem won't be so disruptive again.

Remember sunsite.unc.edu? Sourceforge? Both were the gonna-be-around-forever source code distribution points of their day.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#17

Post by matthuggins »

cooper12 wrote: post #10
banachtarski wrote: post #7

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

It's commonly used as an archival format since it's not lossy like jpeg.

JPEG is commonly used in its lossy format, but there's lossless JPEG[1] as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#19

Post by noobermin »

wyldfire wrote: post #12

/me cringes in fear of a left-pad moment -- what distros can't be built now? Only half joking. ;)

For many distro's, I'm sure they host the binaries (and source) on their own mirrors, so the issue isn't immediately threatening.

Example for my distro, gentoo[0]

[0] http://gentoo.osuosl.org/distfiles/tiff-4.0.6.tar.gz

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#20

Post by School-Cotton »

banachtarski wrote: post #7

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

IIRC, it's used a lot for black-and-white images without a lot of photographic detail (schematics, etc.)
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