Libtiff goes offline

https://madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com/2016/09/08/libtiff-offline/

by hk__2 • 10 years ago

110 114 10 years ago

madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com

Seems like it's time to host it on a DVCS service so the problem won't be so disruptive again.

CydeWeys• 10 years ago

Yeah. It's still on CVS. May as well throw it up on GitHub like every other open source project. That doesn't have to be its only home on the web, but at least it would always be available there. The main open source project I work on (Pywikibot) isn't primarily hosted on GitHub, but it is mirrored there.

japaget2• 10 years ago

Github mirror is at https://github.com/vadz/libtiff .

alrs• 10 years ago

Remember sunsite.unc.edu? Sourceforge? Both were the gonna-be-around-forever source code distribution points of their day.

flukus3• 10 years ago

Which is why a DVCS is important, the history goes with every copy.

sedachv• 10 years ago

Remember sunsite.unc.edu?

That's a throwback. I looked it up and apparently UNC's Sunsite turned into http://www.ibiblio.org/about/

There are a couple of other Sunsites still up. This one looks like it has not been updated since 1997: http://sunsite.ubc.ca/

ashitlerferad4• 10 years ago

Sourceforge still exists. sunsite.unc.edu merged into ibiblio.

japaget2• 10 years ago

The code is now being hosted at http://www.simplesystems.org/libtiff/ with a mirror site at http://libtiff.maptools.org/ .

rsfinn• 10 years ago

There is also a github mirror at https://github.com/vadz/libtiff .

gpvos6• 10 years ago

The nice thing is that every libtiff tarball contains a copy of the web site. So at https://rawgit.com/vadz/libtiff/master/html/index.html you can view a partially functional site (the images don't work very well).

sspiff2• 10 years ago

Or at http://libtiff.org/

jetpks• 10 years ago

libtiff.org is a major release behind.

gpvos6• 10 years ago

NO. That is an old, hijacked domain. Read the story on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibTIFF .

rilut• 10 years ago

because @libtiff is already taken on Github, I think libtiff.gitlab.io is okay enough

BlackFingolfin• 10 years ago

It doesn't seem to be actively used in the past few years, though; isn't there a process one can use to claim unused github user / org names? Might be worth talking to GitHub staff about...

techdragon• 10 years ago

There is definitely process and they should apply for it. Hopefully it's free and not hosting active private repos.

banachtarski4• 10 years ago

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time.

edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

TylerE• 10 years ago

Still run into it with things like patents. It was the goto for a long time for scanned imagery.

cooper12• 10 years ago

It's commonly used as an archival format since it's not lossy like jpeg.

matthuggins• 10 years ago

JPEG is commonly used in its lossy format, but there's lossless JPEG[1] as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG

banachtarski4• 10 years ago

See my edit

rleigh4• 10 years ago

TIFF has selectable (and pluggable) compression. While it's standard to use deflate compression, you can also use jpeg2000 or any other algorithm of your choice if you want lossy compression.

maxxxxx• 10 years ago

TIFF is still used a lot in photography.

umanwizard• 10 years ago

IIRC, it's used a lot for black-and-white images without a lot of photographic detail (schematics, etc.)

tomc1985• 10 years ago

Digital negative storage for photography

Texture data for some videogames

Portable format for layered composites (a la Photoshop)

cornellwright• 10 years ago

Tiff is very useful because it lets you do almost anything. A tiff image is just several arrays of numbers, you decide how many bits, signed, unsigned, float, int, etc.

This is very helpful for processing which treats each pixel as a sample of the scene, such as computational microscopy or remote sensing. I've always wondered if that had something to do with why it was hosted at remotesensing.org.

banachtarski4• 10 years ago

See my edit. Also, when you are doing image processing, operating in scanlines is usually the least performant way of doing things, hence whey we have texture compression formats (even lossless ones) which do block encodings. TIFF has no reason for existing in my opinion.

niccaluim• 10 years ago

It's popular in mapping because it can be georeferenced. https://trac.osgeo.org/geotiff/

forgettableuser• 10 years ago

TIFF is still used in the Apple ecosystems. It got a mini-rebirth recently when Apple started doing retina displays. TIFF has the ability to store multiple images, which Apple has latched onto to allow different images to be used for different resolution screens.

draw_down• 10 years ago

And yet, TIFF images still exist.

mahyarm• 10 years ago

TIFF is typically used as an intermediate uncompressed memory format for almost everything in images. Your png library is probably uncompressing png images into TIFF images internally. Your printer probably translates whatever is given to it into a TIFF image to print, your scanners probably use TIFF as a raw format to translate into something else. Even camera RAW images are probably using TIFF in some way or another.

kalleboo2• 10 years ago

Even camera RAW images are probably using TIFF in some way or another

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Negative DNG is based on the TIFF/EP standard format, and mandates significant use of metadata

wtracy2• 10 years ago

I don't know of any other application-independent image format with good support for layers. Seriously. (Even Tiff doesn't really have good support for layers.)

.PSD is tightly tied to Photoshop's internals, and .xcf is tightly tied to Gimp's internals. (The Gimp core developers explicitly recommend against using .xcf as an interchange format, even though the format has a fairly complete publicly available spec.) I've seen .gif images with multiple frames used as images with layers, but that forces every layer to have the same resolution, and of course limits you to an 8-bit color depth.

Supposedly the Gimp and Krita devs are collaborating on a new interchange format that will support things like layers, but I haven't heard any news about that in years.

DiThi2• 10 years ago

What happened with the OpenRaster format?

kalleboo2• 10 years ago

Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format

You don't have to call it a new format, TIFF has supported lossless compression for decades now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF#TIFF_Compression_Tag

DNG is also based on TIFF, so I can imagine people might use libtiff to read DNG headers.

fdgdasfadsf• 10 years ago

Can we have multichannel 16bit PNGs now? Can PNGs hold 3D images? If so awesome I can drop TIFF at last.

Not all images are taken by cameras using 3 channels.

dagw• 10 years ago

Can we have multichannel 16bit PNGs now?

The PNG-format supports them (up to 4 channels) however not all apps know what do with them.

justinlardinois• 10 years ago

No matter how old or outdated a technology is, there will always be someone still using it somewhere.

I work for a company that makes workers' compensation software. I don't know of anything in our product that actually generates new TIFFs, but we've got plenty of old ones bumping around that were either uploaded by users or imported from other systems. I end up interacting with TIFFs one way or another every other month or so.

rleigh4• 10 years ago

TIFF is one of the most open and flexible file formats out there.

PNG offers only a tiny subset of what's possible with TIFF. Note that TIFF supports multiple compression formats, lossless and lossy, multiple sample formats and sample counts, very flexible organisation of data layout etc. PNG offers a small number of sample formats, fixed layout and compression, and none of the higher-level TIFF features.

PNG is simple and easy to use. But "better" is subjective and by most objective measures it's inferior to TIFF.

rwmj• 10 years ago

TIFF was used (probably still is) to store data from gas detectors. It wasn't called TIFF, but it was based on the format plus custom tags to store extra data and image layers. As a format it is super-flexible.

torrent-of-ions• 10 years ago

TIFF is like a container format. It supports lossless compression. Read up.

aoloe• 10 years ago

As far as I know, PNG does not support CMYK nor spot colors.

Nor clipping paths.

For print, there is not really an "open" alternative that is as good as TIFF.

archildress• 10 years ago

Thankful for libtiff's role in the PSP exploit community many years ago. :)

benwilber0• 10 years ago

also one of the original iPhone 1 jailbreaks

Benjamin_Dobell• 10 years ago

To my knowledge this was the original iPhone jailbreak (JailbreakMe). I was on IRC whilst the author was seeking donations before releasing it ;) Ran it on my trusty iPod Touch 1g only minutes after it was released.

This was for iOS 1.1 though, not iOS 1.0, as it was not encrypted and was never really locked down. It was Apple's choice to release iOS 1.0 without the security enabled that made further jailbreaking efforts much more straight-forward, because there was extensive knowledge of the file system.

This was all well before there was an App Store, and when Apple's public position was that they'd never allow third-party software on their platform ;)

noobermin5• 10 years ago

For important projects like this (libjpeg, libpng and others) it would make sense if there was sort of place to get all of them apart from mirrors.

What am I saying, that place[0] exists. Developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of hosting their code if they don't want to or don't wish to weather the expense. It certainly seems in this case they couldn't pay for self-hosting (or friend-hosting or whatever this is). I do suppose it is difficult to move development to a new system though(CVS to git).

[0] https://github.com/

Mizza• 10 years ago

GitHub will rot some day as well. (I think we're already seeing it start to decline.)

This is simply a permanent problem. Archive.org and to a lesser extent IPFS are viable solutions for archiving, but _contingency_ plans are I think the missing component here. Pray for the best but prepare for the worst.

bane• 10 years ago

You know, come to think of it, Archive.org is sorta kinda the right place to store these things. If they offered source code control they would both get the source as well as the path to the latest version all at once, which could be an invaluable historic record.

themartorana• 10 years ago

I don't think we're seeing a Github decline. Yes they've had some internal strife not all that connected to business, but Google just moved a lot of its OSS there, Microsoft just moved a bunch of stuff there. Git repos take a single command line statement to move, but Github is only slowing if by the force of not having much left to hoover up.

Gitlab et al are growing, and now AWS has its own integrated solution, but I don't see Github going anywhere for a very, very long time. (Barring catastrophic happenings, of course.)

SwellJoe• 10 years ago

That place existed in the past, too: https://sf.net

The question is, can we trust an entity like that to remain trustworthy through decades? Turns out SF.net wasn't trustworthy through all of that time, even if they were in the beginning, and seem to be sincerely trying to be trustworthy again. So, if we put all of our eggs in one basket, we better be really confident of that basket. We could have lost every OSS project website, rather than just one, if an entity that we trust today becomes untrustworthy tomorrow.

jcrawfordor• 10 years ago

I'm no Stallman, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with how readily everyone is accepting (and encouraging) GitHub as the complete overlord of open-source software. As already pointed out, Sourceforge is a cautionary tale of how these services can go very wrong due to business issues. There's also a much larger philosophical issue with basing the open-source economy on a proprietary platform with no particular intent of open-sourcing its core software.

Yes, GH does a lot of things right, including generally making it easy to export data form their apps in a reasonably vendor-neutral form. But what happens when GH runs into financial trouble like SF did? Do we want just about every project out there to have to struggle to do something with their GitHub issues?

There are issues with having open-source projects maintain their own infrastructure, but I think it's the right thing to do wherever possible. It makes them truly independent in a way that a GitHub repo can never be.

_RPM2• 10 years ago

Git is decentralized. GitHub provides free hosting for Git repositories. It's not like if GitHub dies tomorrow, you would lose all your source code.

ocschwar• 10 years ago

Github is a lot easier to migrate out of, come that day.

fucking_tragedy• 10 years ago

What am I saying, that place[0] exists

One day, this will have only existed. Until then, they should host the repository on Google Code.

ashitlerferad4• 10 years ago

Google Code is dead.

lfam• 10 years ago

There is a new project, Software Heritage [0], that specifically addresses the problem of long-term code availability.

https://www.softwareheritage.org/

mary_fortran2• 10 years ago

I won't use github for my own projects because I don't agree with their politics. (If you're ok with them, good for you. I won't stop you.)

Mandating github for everybody is a Bad Idea.

asveikau• 10 years ago

What do you disagree with?

I am receptive to this kind of argument, I am honestly curious for specifics.

cyphar6• 10 years ago

That place should not be a company which is known for not fighting against DMCA requests, and requires that users run proprietary JavaScript. The best place would be the Internet Archive, hopefully running an FSF approved Git front-end (GitLab or GNU Savannah -- Gogs is probably also fine but they haven't reviewed it). Nothing else is acceptable if you actually want to make sure that code will truly outlive us.

wyldfire• 10 years ago

   /me cringes in fear of a left-pad moment -- what distros can't be built now?

Only half joking. ;)

noobermin5• 10 years ago

For many distro's, I'm sure they host the binaries (and source) on their own mirrors, so the issue isn't immediately threatening.

Example for my distro, gentoo[0]

[0] http://gentoo.osuosl.org/distfiles/tiff-4.0.6.tar.gz

jdub• 10 years ago

Any distro that complies with the GPL will generalise its requirements to everything else, and thus host original sources for every single package. :-)

voltagex_• 10 years ago

But not necessarily source history + issues plus obscure facts that were only pointed out once on a mailing list by someone who has since disappeared

cyphar6• 10 years ago

With openSUSE, we store a copy of the source code in our own repos in OBS[1]. And all users can download the source RPMs.

[1] https://build.opensuse.org/

sparky_• 10 years ago

RemoteSensing seems to be back up, with a link to http://libtiff.org as its purported new home.

However looking at the mailing list, it seems this domain is not controlled by the developers.

dustinmr• 10 years ago

Seems like we've had organizations that house ideas for the public good for centuries now.

Why not involve libraries in the effort? They could keep a "master" copy and github.com, gitlab.org, SF.com, or whoever else comes next can host development versions.

throwanem2• 10 years ago

A potentially brilliant idea. I wish I had a clue how to follow up on it. Perhaps someone else here might!

cyphar6• 10 years ago

The Internet Archive would be the perfect group of folks to archive code.

ashitlerferad4• 10 years ago

https://www.softwareheritage.org/

gpvos6• 10 years ago

They only do archiving. Hosting projects that are under development is not in their mission. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/ looks like a better match.

There is a need for an organization that is willing to host established but small and unfunded projects like libtiff, libpng, zlib, etc., and give them some minimal organizational backing in the interest of continuity (so no github). Somewhat similar to, but more general than, what the Network Time Foundation is doing for ntp and related projects.

riffraff• 10 years ago

I'm not saying you should do it or that it's the best option, but putting your code under the umbrella of something like the FSF or the Apache foundation comes with this sort of benefits.

_RPM2• 10 years ago

Why would the libtiff.org owner not want anything to do with the project?

saghm2• 10 years ago

A bit tangential, but I just noticed that in the Arch Linux repos, `libtiff` is version 4.0.6, but there's another package called `libtiff4`, which is version 3.9.7. I don't suppose anybody here might know the rationale behind this bizarre version/naming paradigm?

chrisseaton• 10 years ago

Isn't the number in the library file name a binary incompatibility counter and not necessarily related to the software version number?

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO.h...

saghm2• 10 years ago

Ah, okay, I somehow didn't realize that the trailing number referred to the number in the library file. Thanks!

LukeShu• 10 years ago

As chrisseaton said, version numbers aren't necessarily ABI numbers.

Arch `libtiff` provides libtiff ABI 5, while `libtiff4` provides ABI 4.

bsder• 10 years ago

And we have yet another core infrastructure project that isn't supported and doesn't get funding.

The real issue is that a lot of people rely on this and nobody is willing to put anything back toward it.

Apparently we have learned nothing from the OpenSSL debacle.

gpvos6• 10 years ago

We've had this before, when libtiff.org was hijacked, which it still is: it contains an old version of the libtiff website, with ads.

L33THaQer• 10 years ago

LibTiff.info and LibTiff.io point to one of the available mirrors.

victormunoz• 10 years ago

There exists an alternative to TiffLib called TiffLibrary4java. https://github.com/EasyinnovaSL/Tiff-Library-4J http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.easyinnova/tifflibrary...

Libtiff goes offline

Related Stories