imread/imwrite

[Thomas L. Scofield]

If no one else is working on this, I would like to try my hand at implementing these functions in Octave.

I've not contributed before, and I still haven't figured out mercurial on my Intel Mac with OS 10.4.11.  So, I'll probably have questions along the way concerning these.

I've followed discussions about imread/imwrite over the past 6 months or so, so I am aware of things like

 - these functions are already implemented in the image package, with special cases

   implemented for .png and .jpg files.

 - getting these functions into core Octave soon has been made a priority by John Eaton.

 - the general consensus has thus far been that the best compromise between ease

   of implementation and bloat is to employ the Magick++ library.

Is anyone else working on this?  Has anyone worked on it privately and dropped it, but has useful information to share?

Dumb question from someone who hasn't used libraries for programming in a long time: Does anyone ever remove chunks of code from a library to produce a smaller library?  If it is even possible, does this violate the GPL in any way?  My impression is that the beef against Magick++ is that it has far more capability in it than is now needed, causing a big draw on memory that isn't really necessary.

Thomas L. Scofield

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Associate Professor

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Calvin College

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