2024.02.03 23:21 "Re: [Tiff] www.libtiff.org is restored", by Patrice Fournier

Hi Bob,

> Lee Howard has managed to acquire the libtiff.org domain (with great
> effort and expense to himself).

That's an excellent news! Thanks Lee!

We should keep in mind that Lee Howard is a maintainer of Hylafax, which is now broken given latest libtiff due to many libtiff utilities being removed. It would be beneficial for his project (and others) if the deprecated/removed libtiff utilities are restored (with security fixes), if even as a different project from libtiff itself.

This would be really helpful indeed! I was already looking at my teams (iFAX Solutions (HylaFAX Enterprise and HylaFAX), but also T38Fax which uses these tools internally) to spare some time to work on this, but first, we'll need to know where to work on this and where to handle the issues. We'd personally prefer it be in the libtiff project, either in the main project, master branch or at minimum a separate branch from which (security issues) fixed tools are merged back into master. This would require all tools bugs to be restored and `wontfix-unmaintained` tags changed to `tools` or something like that, from which we could identify/label security issues and know which ones to concentrate on for this task (and the main libtiff team could exclude in their buglist if they so prefer, until we made enough progress).

Working in a separate project under the libtiff group or a separate one (I got `libtiff-tools` just in case) would allow giving rights to different people from the main project and have the bugs completely separated if that is preferred. And if it's a fork of the main project, still makes for easy merge requests so the fixes makes it to the main project. Adding that layer would complicate things when it's time to report bugs to tools though, especially when some tools bugs need to go to the main project and not others.

Is the libtiff team willing to have a group of helpers come on board to work on tools issues inside the libtiff project so we can restore these tools and willing to restore tools to build automatically inside the main libtiff project? (So at first, restore the issues that have been closed so we can work on this and agree to get tools back inside the main project?) If the goal is to not burden the current team with these issues, then we'd need to create a tools team to triage these bugs, add labels, close them, etc., so that would require at minimum some reporter level users. Might also need some developer to merge the fixes unless the main team is willing to accept that role.

P.S. http://libtiff.org/ doesn't redirect like http://www.libtiff.org/ does. It shows the main Simple Systems web page.

Regards,

Patrice Fournier
iFAX Solutions, Inc.
http://www.ifax.com/