Re: [Freeciv-Dev] xpm, gif, png & map view!

[Lalo Martins <lalo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 08, Matt Busigin decided to present us with:
> On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, Lalo Martins wrote:
> 
> #Not really. You  would  then have   to  write a separate program   to
> #generate   these   files. gzip/gunzip  are  better    in  this aspect
> #(easy to generate).
> 
> Nonono - use library calls to produce/uncompress GNU zipped files.

Yes. Then you would depend on civclient to generate those files,
which is bad.

With xpm/gzip you create the image in any program that edits xpm
and compress them with gzip - or even, in GIMP, save them as
"foo.xpm.gz" and the GIMP does the hard work for you.

In opposition, if FreeCiv uses zlib to compress/uncompress there
would be no standard tools to create/edit the files. The FreeCiv
team would have to maintain a separate program to do that, sort
of: "civzip -d tiles.zpm; gimp tiles.xpm; civzip tiles.xpm".

And no, you can't just use gzip/gunzip with zlib. I've been
informed that it's not one-to-one compatible (zlib doesn't read
all gzipped files and gunzip doesn't read all zlib-compressed
files, for some reason I don't understand).

So if you want something "UNIX standard", reasonable, which
everyone can handle, you will have to use gzip/gunzip with
pipes. Otherwise, for half the work of supporting zlib you could
just support libpng.

[]s,
                                               |alo
                                               +----
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