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Libtiff goes offline
- victormunoz 10y agoThere exists an alternative to TiffLib called TiffLibrary4java. https://github.com/EasyinnovaSL/Tiff-Library-4J https://github.com/EasyinnovaSL/Tiff-Library-4J http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.easyinnova/tifflibrary4java http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.easyinnova/tifflibrary...
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoSeems like it's time to host it on a DVCS service so the problem won't be so disruptive again.
- CydeWeys 10y agoYeah. It's still on CVS. May as well throw it up on GitHub like every other open source project. That doesn't have to be its only home on the web, but at least it would always be available there. The main open source project I work on (Pywikibot) isn't primarily hosted on GitHub, but it is mirrored there.
- japaget 10y agoGithub mirror is at https://github.com/vadz/libtiff https://github.com/vadz/libtiff .
- alrs 10y agoRemember sunsite.unc.edu? Sourceforge? Both were the gonna-be-around-forever source code distribution points of their day.
- sedachv 10y ago> Remember sunsite.unc.edu? That's a throwback. I looked it up and apparently UNC's Sunsite turned into http://www.ibiblio.org/about/ http://www.ibiblio.org/about/ There are a couple of other Sunsites still up. This one looks like it has not been updated since 1997: http://sunsite.ubc.ca/ http://sunsite.ubc.ca/
- tropo 10y agoNah, sunsite is a noob, along with Slackware. When you wanted to download boot/root, Tamu, or SLS you went to tsx-11.mit.edu or ftp.funet.fi to get it.
- flukus 10y agoWhich is why a DVCS is important, the history goes with every copy.
- kasey_junk 10y agoA history goes with every copy. You still need a protocol for determining the history.
- cyphar 10y agoIf you have a maintainer who signs their commits, you trust their signatures and call it a day. Go with the latest commit and that tells you the history that they have cryptographically claimed is "correct".
- Someone 10y agoOne problem I see there is that, with git, you still have to take care that you keep around all the commits that at any given point in time were declared "correct". For example, if a commit is amended and force pushed out to remove a backdoor from a popular package, a site interested in the history of the library will want to ensure that the faulty commit stays around. I'm not even sure that is 100% possible, but it, at least, will take some careful git configuration.
- cyphar 10y agoYou never rewrite published history with git. It's fine to force push signed git commits to a random branch that are going to be rewritten -- that's just how development works. But when you merge something, it stays that way. Touching history in release branches is something that will always end in tears (all of the tagging breaks, everyone's clone will complain when they update it, etc). Just bad news all around. As for a site which cares about archiving, they can almost certainly add a tag for every commit they slurp up (making sure it doesn't get hit by the git gc). Though, I'm fairly sure that you can just configure your git instance to never garbage collect.
- 10y ago
- ashitlerferad 10y agoSourceforge still exists. sunsite.unc.edu merged into ibiblio.
- japaget 10y agoThe code is now being hosted at http://www.simplesystems.org/libtiff/ http://www.simplesystems.org/libtiff/ with a mirror site at http://libtiff.maptools.org/ http://libtiff.maptools.org/ .
- rsfinn 10y agoThere is also a github mirror at https://github.com/vadz/libtiff https://github.com/vadz/libtiff .
- gpvos 10y agoThe nice thing is that every libtiff tarball contains a copy of the web site. So at https://rawgit.com/vadz/libtiff/master/html/index.html https://rawgit.com/vadz/libtiff/master/html/index.html you can view a partially functional site (the images don't work very well).
- sspiff 10y agoOr at http://libtiff.org/ http://libtiff.org/
- _RPM 10y agoWhy would the libtiff.org owner not want anything to do with the project?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dustinmr 10y agoSeems like we've had organizations that house ideas for the public good for centuries now. Why not involve libraries in the effort? They could keep a "master" copy and github.com, gitlab.org, SF.com, or whoever else comes next can host development versions.
- throwanem 10y agoA potentially brilliant idea. I wish I had a clue how to follow up on it. Perhaps someone else here might!
- cyphar 10y agoThe Internet Archive would be the perfect group of folks to archive code.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoIndeed. Updates in Github (which can create a webhook) should trigger an archive operation. It has been on my list to integrate https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup with https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot.
- rlkf 10y agoI love the Internet Archive, so it would be great if some kind of archiving function could be worked out. But if it's on GitHub now, it should be exported to Zenodo today, so there's at least one reference version around for Internet Archive to backup.
- ashitlerferad 10y agohttps://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://www.softwareheritage.org/
- gpvos 10y agoThey only do archiving. Hosting projects that are under development is not in their mission. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/ looks like a better match. There is a need for an organization that is willing to host established but small and unfunded projects like libtiff, libpng, zlib, etc., and give them some minimal organizational backing in the interest of continuity (so no github). Somewhat similar to, but more general than, what the Network Time Foundation is doing for ntp and related projects.
- rilut 10y agobecause @libtiff is already taken on Github, I think libtiff.gitlab.io is okay enough
- BlackFingolfin 10y agoIt doesn't seem to be actively used in the past few years, though; isn't there a process one can use to claim unused github user / org names? Might be worth talking to GitHub staff about...
- techdragon 10y agoThere is definitely process and they should apply for it. Hopefully it's free and not hosting active private repos.
- banachtarski 10y agoTiff? 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
- TylerE 10y agoStill run into it with things like patents. It was the goto for a long time for scanned imagery.
- cooper12 10y agoIt's commonly used as an archival format since it's not lossy like jpeg.
- matthuggins 10y agoJPEG is commonly used in its lossy format, but there's lossless JPEG[1] as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG
- acdha 10y agoApplication support is pretty huge, though: that's what effectively turned JPEG 2000 into a niche format since the standard was patent and license encumbered for the first decade and change and the vendors didn't make interoperability a priority because they assumed the technical merits would force everyone to adopt it in the end. When you're talking about lossless, however, it's often in the context of archival storage and people get spooked after they encounter files which they have trouble opening with perfect fidelity. It's a shame since the compression technology was impressive and j2k would also have made a great progressive image format had browsers supported it.
- banachtarski 10y agoSee my edit
- archildress 10y agoThankful for libtiff's role in the PSP exploit community many years ago. :)
- benwilber0 10y agoalso one of the original iPhone 1 jailbreaks
- Benjamin_Dobell 10y agoTo my knowledge this was the original iPhone jailbreak (JailbreakMe). I was on IRC whilst the author was seeking donations before releasing it ;) Ran it on my trusty iPod Touch 1g only minutes after it was released. This was for iOS 1.1 though, not iOS 1.0, as it was not encrypted and was never really locked down. It was Apple's choice to release iOS 1.0 without the security enabled that made further jailbreaking efforts much more straight-forward, because there was extensive knowledge of the file system. This was all well before there was an App Store, and when Apple's public position was that they'd never allow third-party software on their platform ;)
- noobermin 10y agoFor 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/ https://github.com/
- mary_fortran 10y agoI won't use github for my own projects because I don't agree with their politics. (If you're ok with them, good for you. I won't stop you.) Mandating github for everybody is a Bad Idea.
- asveikau 10y agoWhat do you disagree with? I am receptive to this kind of argument, I am honestly curious for specifics.
- cyphar 10y agoPresumably the fact that they take down repositories that disagree with their politics (or the politics of other governments). They also don't appear to put up any fight against DMCA's, and they mandate that all users must run proprietary JavaScript. LibreJS makes the site mostly work though, so it's not that bad. The biggest problem is their policies, which are not pro-free-software (no matter what they might say).
- mary_fortran 10y agoThat's irrelevant, really. Just that standardizing on a particular business for all repositories will never please everyone. See if there's a better solution.
- defective 10y agoGithub had a feminism mini-scandal a couple years ago: http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/15/5512462/github-developer-leaves-alleging-gender-harassment http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/15/5512462/github-developer-l...
- wyldfire 10y ago/me cringes in fear of a left-pad moment -- what distros can't be built now? Only half joking. ;)
- noobermin 10y agoFor 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 http://gentoo.osuosl.org/distfiles/tiff-4.0.6.tar.gz
- jdub 10y agoAny distro that complies with the GPL will generalise its requirements to everything else, and thus host original sources for every single package. :-)
- voltagex_ 10y agoBut not necessarily source history + issues plus obscure facts that were only pointed out once on a mailing list by someone who has since disappeared
- cyphar 10y agoWith openSUSE, we store a copy of the source code in our own repos in OBS[1]. And all users can download the source RPMs. [1]: https://build.opensuse.org/ https://build.opensuse.org/
- sparky_ 10y agoRemoteSensing seems to be back up, with a link to http://libtiff.org http://libtiff.org as its purported new home. However looking at the mailing list, it seems this domain is not controlled by the developers.
- saghm 10y agoA bit tangential, but I just noticed that in the Arch Linux repos, `libtiff` is version 4.0.6, but there's another package called `libtiff4`, which is version 3.9.7. I don't suppose anybody here might know the rationale behind this bizarre version/naming paradigm?
- chrisseaton 10y agoIsn't the number in the library file name a binary incompatibility counter and not necessarily related to the software version number? http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO.html#AEN46 http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO.h...
- saghm 10y agoAh, okay, I somehow didn't realize that the trailing number referred to the number in the library file. Thanks!
- LukeShu 10y agoAs chrisseaton said, version numbers aren't necessarily ABI numbers. Arch `libtiff` provides libtiff ABI 5, while `libtiff4` provides ABI 4.
- dragon_ninja 10y agoThis is so stupid.
- bsder 10y agoAnd we have yet another core infrastructure project that isn't supported and doesn't get funding. The real issue is that a lot of people rely on this and nobody is willing to put anything back toward it. Apparently we have learned nothing from the OpenSSL debacle.
- gpvos 10y agoWe've had this before, when libtiff.org was hijacked, which it still is: it contains an old version of the libtiff website, with ads.
- L33THaQer 10y agoLibTiff.info and LibTiff.io point to one of the available mirrors.