[Openexr-devel] Upcoming 1.2 release

[Drew Hess]

Hi all,

We're planning on releasing OpenEXR 1.2 next week.  Version 1.2 will be
the first stable, production-ready release of the tiled image file format.

There are a few cosmetic changes since the last development release,
version 1.1.1, but the APIs and file formats are identical to 1.1.1.

If you know of any issues with 1.1.1, now is the time to speak up before
we release 1.2.  ILM has been using the new tiled format for about 2
months now and we've encountered no issues with it.

Note to OpenEXR package maintainers: I am bumping the major version of the
OpenEXR shared libraries for the 1.2 series to 2.  (The 1.0 series was
major version 0, and the 1.1 development series was major version 1.)  
Let me know if you have any objections.

re: compilers on GNU/Linux, I'm afraid we're going to have to "de-support" 
gcc 2.95 for the 1.2 release.  I haven't had any time to get to the bottom 
of the template problems that gcc 2.95 has with the tiling code, and I 
doubt that anybody else from ILM's side will have time, either.  Of 
course, if somebody in the community can make it work without requiring 
any major surgery to the code, I'd be glad to incorporate that into a 
future release of OpenEXR.

As far as I know, the only unfortunate consequence of this decision is
that Shake 3.0 users on GNU/Linux will have to link the Shake OpenEXR
plugin to the version 1.0.7 libraries, and won't be able to read or write
tiled OpenEXR files from Shake.  Of course, you can always losslessly
re-encode tiled OpenEXR files as scanline files in order to use those
images with Shake 3.0 on GNU/Linux.  I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Shake 3.5 for GNU/Linux appears to be compiled with gcc 3.2 (or later), so
this won't be a problem for current and future versions of Shake on that
platform.


-dwh-