gd development as part of php.net

Unfortunately there hasn't been any movement on this since I handed it over to Pierre in April. Obviously, since I sat on PHP myself for a really long time, I am not pointing the finger at Pierre here. I'm still the champion gd-neglect-ster by a LONG shot. However, I'm wondering if anyone else is eager to help him make a new release of gd happen as part of the PHP project. If necessary, I could go looking for a new maintainer again, though that surely wouldn't be fun and I'd prefer almost anything else. (: * * * On a related note, I'm wondering why PHP doesn't seem to have any official relationship with the ImageMagick project - Which offers an unofficial PHP extension of its own. Though gd has been good to me over the years, I'm not going to sit here and pretend gd has a modern graphics API. It doesn't. gd has a very 1989 API, full of integer-oriented assumptions and less-than-smooth implementations of graphics primitives, written by a guy with no formal background in graphics algorithms (me). And that's always going to be visible in the quality of its output, short of a total core rewrite and API redesign. The good thing about gd was always the simple API - but a simple API at the C level doesn't necessarily help anymore when the end user isn't coding in C anyway. And ImageMagick has a floating-point, vector-oriented API that can do a whole lot more. With a coder-friendly "MagickWand" API that gives it simplicity approaching gd, especially when used from languages like PHP. Also, the ImageMagick license appears to be GPL-compatible and making-money-compatible: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/license.php So, at the expense of my own site traffic perhaps, why the outdated gd API and not ImageMagick in the official PHP builds? -- Thomas Boutell Boutell.Com, Inc. http://www.boutell.com/