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Technically you're not wrong, though I will point out that it'd still be running the bleeding-edge unstable ImageMagick by definition. But even so, in practice

by chias 5y ago

Technically you're not wrong, though I will point out that it'd still be running the bleeding-edge unstable ImageMagick by definition. But even so, in practice, building ImageMagick it yourself, along with all configuration and integration into PHP (yes, it was a PHP site) on a production webserver is a much bigger lift than that. And then you have to maintain it manually. Arguably this is a much less stable result than running a bleeding edge Debian install where you just `apt-get install php-imagemagick`.

filmor 5y ago
You could backport the patch, that's exactly how Debian achieves stability.
- chias 5y ago
  Doing so myself is the antithesis of depending on stable software. As someone who maintains a PHP website in my spare time, no, I'm not going to go backport a patch to a C library -- a language I have a passing familiarity with -- which may depend on other updates that have occurred between now and the last Debian Stable release, and which may, if I do it wrong, compromise the security and stability of my entire system.
gmfawcett 5y ago
Fair. Re: bleeding edge, my point was that you could keep the rest of your system stable -- building one component yourself lets you make that tradeoff.
- chias 5y ago
  Yup. Both of those options were bad enough that I found a really janky [0] workaround to buy me the time in which to rewrite the entire image generation stack. I ended up writing it in Rust, and it's worked beautifully ever since. My implementation was approx 4x faster than the ImageMagick version, and afforded me flexibility and features not implemented in ImageMagick, so it's been great. [0] https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?p=155229&sid=85b118f4f2e6ef3d0a7ae44c7726a18e#p155229 https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.ph...
  - gmfawcett 5y ago
    That janky (but clever!) hack sounds like something I'd do... and then leave running in production for 10 years. :) Well done for writing your own solution!

by chias 5y ago

filmor 5y ago

You could backport the patch, that's exactly how Debian achieves stability.

chias 5y ago
Doing so myself is the antithesis of depending on stable software. As someone who maintains a PHP website in my spare time, no, I'm not going to go backport a patch to a C library -- a language I have a passing familiarity with -- which may depend on other updates that have occurred between now and the last Debian Stable release, and which may, if I do it wrong, compromise the security and stability of my entire system.

gmfawcett 5y ago

Fair. Re: bleeding edge, my point was that you could keep the rest of your system stable -- building one component yourself lets you make that tradeoff.

chias 5y ago
Yup. Both of those options were bad enough that I found a really janky [0] workaround to buy me the time in which to rewrite the entire image generation stack. I ended up writing it in Rust, and it's worked beautifully ever since. My implementation was approx 4x faster than the ImageMagick version, and afforded me flexibility and features not implemented in ImageMagick, so it's been great. [0] https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?p=155229&sid=85b118f4f2e6ef3d0a7ae44c7726a18e#p155229 https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.ph...
- gmfawcett 5y ago
  That janky (but clever!) hack sounds like something I'd do... and then leave running in production for 10 years. :) Well done for writing your own solution!