The long and winding road to 8.13

[jcupitt]

Aim for a release in late May.

TODO

• dzsave to target
• tiffsave to target see PR Add tiffsave target #2798
• GIF save improvements see PR cgifsave: reuse global palette, if possible #2797
• support linear light in JXL see PR add libjxl ICC and scRGB support #2815
• resolve JXL lossless encode issues
• update downstream projects where necessary
• fix JXL save of float RGB (need new SAVEABLE enum)
• another round of GIF fixes
• website docs update
• release notes and a news post to write
• put out an rc for evaluation
• .... and get the rc at least mostly approved by downstream users
• publicity

Milestone: https://github.com/libvips/libvips/milestone/11

[jcupitt]

@dloebl we should get some GIF fixes in too. Please add some notes to the TODO above if you like.

[vansante]

Would love to see this one 😉

[jcupitt]

pyvips now has support in master for the new targetcustom stuff, and it seems to work well

[kleisauke]

I just emailed Remi Collet with a patch that migrates the vips spec file to build with Meson for the upcoming 8.13 release. While doing so, I noticed 2 things:

• The VIPS_VERSION_STRING definition doesn't include the ChangeLog date when building with Meson, but perhaps that's OK.
  

  libvips/libvips/include/vips/meson.build

  Line 132 in 111eef0

  version_data.set('VIPS_VERSION_STRING', meson.project_version())

  
  

  libvips/configure.ac

  Line 29 in 111eef0

  VIPS_VERSION_STRING="$VIPS_VERSION-$(date -u -r $srcdir/ChangeLog)"

• nifticlib usage needs to be disabled on Fedora due to missing pkg-config files. This will hopefully be fixed once PR Generate pkgconfig files NIFTI-Imaging/nifti_clib#140 is merged.

[jcupitt]

OK, I think we're almost ready. Shall we feature-freeze and do a release?

[kleisauke]

I have nothing to add for 8.13, so I'm fine with a feature freeze and a possible release candidate. Though, I noticed some pending cgifsave PRs for possible inclusion.

[jcupitt]

I think we need to do another round of GIF polishing :( I'll make an issue with some benchmarks.

[jcupitt]

I think I found another cgifsave issue --- this GIF:

When copied like this:

vips copy sample.gif[n=-1] x.gif

Becomes this:

I think the problem is that the colour table is being improved by the render pass. It's improving the colour table based on the first frame and that of course makes it much worse for the later frames.

We probably need to remove the improve ctable feature in global cmap mode.

[dloebl]

Interesting find. This looks similar to the issue mentioned here: #2797 (comment)
We probably want to get the palette right after quantizing the attached global colour table then - so it does not get "optimized" during dithering/remapping?

libvips/libvips/foreign/cgifsave.c

Line 629 in 6260a37

if( vips__quantise_image_quantize( tmp_image,

[jcupitt]

Yes, it's a simple change, just read out the palette before remapping the frame. I'll make a PR once the current two cgif PRs merge.

[jcupitt]

OK, the palette improvement issue is done. I've started writing a "what's new" post -- any comments?

https://github.com/libvips/libvips/blob/gh-pages-8.13/_posts/2022-05-28-What's-new-in-8.13.md

• @kleisauke would you like to expand the image quality section?
• @dloebl @DarthSim would you like to add to the GIF section?
• does the running order look OK? maybe the new build system should not be first? only devs would care about that

[DarthSim]

I don't think we should remove interframe-maxerror and interpalette-maxerror. While their default values are pretty good, some may want to tune them for their case.

[jcupitt]

Release candidate 1: https://github.com/libvips/libvips/releases/tag/v8.13.0-rc1

Release notes posted: https://www.libvips.org/2022/05/28/What's-new-in-8.13.html

API docs: https://www.libvips.org/API/8.13/

[jcupitt]

... let's wait a week for people to test rc1, and if no one finds anything too bad, we'll announce 8.13.0 on 26 June.

[jcupitt]

It looks like there are enough rc1 issues to need an rc2 next weekend.

[Elad-Laufer]

When building from source in a container (with lima) I get the following error:

#6 100.3 Found runner: ['/usr/bin/ninja']
#6 100.6 ninja: Entering directory `/tmp/libvips-8.13.0-rc1/libvips-release'
#6 100.6 ninja: no work to do.
#6 111.2 3/8 seq         OK             3.48s
#6 111.2 4/8 stall       OK             2.18s
#6 111.2 5/8 threading   OK             7.94s
#6 111.2 7/8 descriptors OK             0.47s
#6 111.2 8/8 fuzz        OK             4.73s
#6 111.2 
#6 111.2 Summary of Failures:
#6 111.2 
#6 111.2 1/8 cli         FAIL           0.42s (exit status 1)
#6 111.2 2/8 formats     FAIL           0.37s (exit status 1)
#6 111.2 6/8 connections FAIL           0.37s (exit status 1)
#6 111.2 
#6 111.2 Ok:                 5   
#6 111.2 Expected Fail:      0   
#6 111.2 Fail:               3   
#6 111.2 Unexpected Pass:    0   
#6 111.2 Skipped:            0   
#6 111.2 Timeout:            0   

The Dockerfile:

FROM golang:bullseye as builder

ARG LIBVIPS_VERSION="8.13.0-rc1"

# Installs libvips + required libraries

RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
    apt update && \
    apt install --no-install-recommends -y \
    meson cmake ca-certificates \
    libtool autotools-dev build-essential curl \
    libgirepository1.0-dev gtk-doc-tools libglib2.0-dev \
    libjpeg62-turbo-dev libpng-dev \
    libwebp-dev libtiff5-dev libgif-dev libexif-dev libxml2-dev libpoppler-glib-dev \
    swig libmagickwand-dev libpango1.0-dev libmatio-dev libopenslide-dev libcfitsio-dev \
    libgsf-1-dev libfftw3-dev liborc-0.4-dev librsvg2-dev libimagequant-dev libheif-dev \
    libopenjp2-7-dev liblcms2-dev

RUN cd /tmp && \
    curl -fsSLO https://github.com/libvips/libvips/archive/refs/tags/v${LIBVIPS_VERSION}.tar.gz && \
    tar zvxf v${LIBVIPS_VERSION}.tar.gz && \
    cd libvips-${LIBVIPS_VERSION} && \
    meson setup libvips-release --prefix=/tmp --libdir=lib --buildtype=release && \
    cd libvips-release && \
    meson compile && \
    meson test && \
    meson install && \
    ldconfig

[jcupitt]

Perhaps we can do something about this:

$ vips rotate k2.jpg x.png 90

has a one-pixel black line down the left of x.png.

[Elad-Laufer]

Solved the Debian build issue by installing 'bc':

RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
    apt update && \
    apt install --no-install-recommends -y \
    bc meson cmake ca-certificates \

thanks @netanel-r

[jcupitt]

Here's rc2.:

https://github.com/libvips/libvips/releases/tag/v8.13.0-rc2

Let's aim for release on Sunday 17 July (assuming nothing too bad happens in testing).

[danielniccoli]

Any chance for a Windows release? The last Windows binary 8.12.1 still has a bug impacting me, that was fixed in 8.12.2. 🙏

[jcupitt]

Kleis has made 8.12.2 binaries here:

https://github.com/libvips/build-win64-mxe/releases/tag/v8.12.2

And 8.13.0-rc2 here:

https://github.com/libvips/build-win64-mxe/releases/tag/v8.13.0-rc2

[jcupitt]

Ooof right, sorry, I was on holiday and had less time than I expected. Now I'm back!

A few more bugfixes have gone in this week, but only a few. Shall we do 8.13.0 now? Any thoughts?

[kleisauke]

Nothing extra from me for 8.13, so feel free to whenever you're ready.

[jcupitt]

Woo hoo! Well done us!

https://github.com/libvips/libvips/releases/tag/v8.13.0

[jcupitt]

Just publicity left to do now. Please feel feel free to tweet, post on reddit, whatever you like.

[DarthSim]

Is it already Christmas?