[Digikam-users] libkdcraw and libraw

[Gilles Caulier]

Hi all,

If you follow me on Google+ Social Network, you have been certainly
seen my post about Libraw cmake port that i just completed...

The reason of this port is of course to drop the automake/autoconf
dependency, but not only... I would to resolve this entry in bugzilla
:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307146

To resume, for packaging purpose, libkdcraw is a hell to maintain,
especially when security issue are found in libraw. As code is
currently embedded to libkdcraw, this duplicate code and multiply
patches to apply and recompilation to done by distro team.

So, in a dedicated development branch, i dropped all libraw code from
libkdcraw. In next main release (typically for KDE 4.12.0), libkdcraw
will depand of an external libraw 0.16.0 version (not yet released).

As libraw is a big puzzle, this will have some side effect in digiKam.
libraw depend of some external dependencies, as LCMS, Jasper, LibJPEG,
which an effect to some RAW codec available. But the most important is
GPL2, GPL3, and RawSpeed extension packs which are _NOT_ provided by
as standard in libraw tarball. And in this case, if packs are not
integrated by packagers, A LOTS OF codecs, demosaicing methods, and
options will be disabled in RAW decoding setting widget...

For info, link to packs are listed below :

http://www.libraw.org/download for LibRaw-demosaic-pack-GPL2/3
http://rawstudio.org/blog/?p=800 for RawSpeed

The advantage to embed libraw to libkdcraw is to provide to best
version of RAW support in digiKam, because all extension packs are
also embedded... But from a packager viewpoint, it's the hell to
maintain...

So, I provided in digiKam Components Info dialog all details about
libraw packs used at packaging time. If it will miss something, well
don't cry about digiKam team, but ask to your distro packagers to
include all extension packs in libraw package.

Best

Gilles Caulier