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

[Markus Linnala <maage@xxxxxxxxx>]

Lalo Martins <lalo@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Mar 08, Matt Busigin decided to present us with:
> > On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, Lalo Martins wrote:
> > 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".

I think your experience with libz is somewhat limited and you
are slightly misguided.

Compression format is exactly same with gzip and with libz. You
can compress file with gzip and read it with libz. You can
compress file with libz and uncompress it with gzip and then
read it with normal means. You can read normal files with libz
as it senses that file is not compressed. There should not be
any major problem with libz. At least not compatibility and
portability issues between systems with or without libz and also
between manually gzipped save-games.

You might want to get in touch with libz and read its
documentation.

-- 
//Markus