Subject: Re: Image viewer/screengrab util (not xv)
To: NetBSD-current Discussion List <current-users@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@weird.com>
List: current-users
Date: 03/07/2005 17:38:07
[ On Monday, March 7, 2005 at 18:01:39 (+0000), David Brownlee wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Image viewer/screengrab util (not xv)
>
>  	If someone would like to take up xv development that would be
>  	_wonderful_, but short of that...

ImageMagick is obviously still being maintained, but is it really any
better, from a security perspective, than anything else?

I haven't looked at it in a very long time now, but the last time I did
it was full of more core-dumping holes than anything else in its class,
and most of those I noticed just when playing around with properly
formatted image files, never mind trying to break it on purpose.  Has
its code quality and security improved significantly in the past few
years?

(I had never tried xzgv before now, but just did.  It is significantly
less featureful than xv in the image manipulation and format handling
department.  It's also still a bit buggy too it seems, and it doesn't
seem to deal very well with 8-bit displays, a documented deficiency,
though by default it may be a bit better than xv at finding "close"
colours; and it has glaringly different contrast ratios than xv on a
monochrome screen.  However it's not bad for a 0.x release :-)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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