Re: Building AbiWord without libwmf and removing libwmf from Guix

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> writes:

> Leo Famulari <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> The last update to libwmf was twelve years ago, in 2005. In the
>> meantime, a large number of security issues have been discovered in this
>> library. These bugs are fixed somewhat haphazardly by the distributions.
>>
>> While working on patching CVE-2016-9011 in libwmf, and backporting fixes
>> for CVE-2016-{9317,10167,10168} in the ancient bundled libgd, I find
>> myself wondering if we need this library at all. The patches from this
>> 12 year span of 3rd party fixes begin to conflict with each other...
>>
>> Libwmf is only used as a "plugin" by AbiWord, and AbiWord can be
>> configured to build without it.
>
> What functionality would be lost?  I guess that AbiWord would lose the
> ability to open some kinds of files, but it would be good to know
> whether or not such files are still in common use.

WMF is the native vector format for Microsoft Office applications,
according to Wikipedia, so this would probably affect the rendering of
some images in Word documents that are opened with Abiword.

The format has continuously been developed, so it’s possible that libwmf
(with a last release in 2005) isn’t even able to handle recent versions
of WMF.

I think it would be better to remove libwmf.

-- 
Ricardo

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