Exploration of alternatives to imagemagick-native

[josephdenne]

Explore the potential for replacing imagemagick-native with gd or gmic to reduce dependencies, improve compatibility and improve performance.

imagemagick-native is currently not compatible with recent releases of Node, which is less than ideal.

[jimlambie]

Appears this is being discussed in many places, a suggestion here for a (temporary?) fix...

[josephdenne]

Looks like a good short term solution until it's fully patched up. Will test and update.

[josephdenne]

So this introduces all sorts of issues... not a simple drop in I'm afraid.

[vorpalhex]

I've implemented a gd based solution that drops our native requirements down to a single easily installed one (no more hunting down versions of libcairo).

The GD library is quite a bit simpler and works across all the node versions I've tested so far, including the current LTS release.

I've wrapped it in a promise based interface so the code looks something like this(taken from a test):

image.load(img)
    .then(image.flip)
    .then(function(img){ return image.blur(img, 10); })
    .then(function(img){ return image.crop(img, 0, 0, 250); })
    .then(function(img){ return image.save(img, 'png'); })
    .then(function(img){ return fs.writeFileSync('./results.png', img, 'ascii'); })
    .then(done)
    .catch(done);

You can play with this on the feature/gd_conversion branch.

We can either simply replace image-magick, which would be disruptive and force all clients to have to update, or we could also implement a new URL scheme which I'll detail in a new issue

[jimlambie]

@dark12222000 I went with lwip in the end, but keeping your GD work around for future reference. May thanks!

Closed by aae39e5