Re: does anybody care about hylafax? It is broken.

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost> writes:

> 	Hello Greg.  I actually do care about Hylafax, because it works with the Iaxmodem soft
> modem software, allowing Asterisk to send and receive faxes via Hylafax.  If I understand your
> message, the problem is that the new tiff library doesn't support the same functionality that
> Hylafax relies upon.

The package graphics/tiff is the upstream "libtiff" from
http://simplesystems.org/libtiff/

This consists of a tiff library and some command-line utilities.  Many
of the utilities have had security issues that no one has fixed.  In
addition, many of the tools use libtiff internals, rather than the
documented APIs.  Therefore, upstream has said that packages should not
build them and that they will not accept bug reports.  I quote from
their homepage:

  Starting with libtiff v4.6.0, the source code for most TIFF tools
  (except tiffinfo, tiffdump, tiffcp and tiffset) was discontinued, due
  to the lack of contributors able to address reported security
  issues. tiff2ps and tiff2pdf source code has been moved in a
  unsupported category, no longer built by default, but are still part
  of the the source distribution. Other retired utilities are in a
  archive/ directory, only available in the libtiff git
  repository. Issues related to unsupported and archived tools will no
  longer be accepted in the libtiff bug tracker.


hylafax relies on tiff2ps.  When built with tiff < 4.6.0, it builds.
With 4.60, hylafax's configure errors out.  One path is likely someone
implementing a program, perhaps a shell script calling ImageMagick, that
behaves as tiffp2s did, and having hylafax depend on that.  Everyone has
this problem, not just pkgsrc, so it seems likely that the maintained
upstream will resolve it over the next year.

It might be that hylafax doesn't actually need tiff2ps for most things
and the configure check could be patched out.  (Getting a fax as a tiff
rather than a ps seems fine to me.)  But that is perhaps best left to
upstream.

It turns out it was relatively easy to add a tiff-unsupported option, so
I did.  If you build and install tiff with that option, then hylafax
builds.  I do not know if it works -- there may be some other tiff 4.6.0
incompatibility.  Of course this option is and will remain default off.

(It remains for someone to update comms/hylafax to use the sourceforge
upstream.)


Is iaxmodem packaged?  It would be nice if it were, as then in theory I
could send a fax without finding my old fax modem :-)

Greg