2023.04.03 20:50 "[Tiff] Remove TIFFCROP from LibTiff", by Sulau

2023.04.04 13:49 "Re: [Tiff] Remove TIFFCROP from LibTiff + tiff2ps & tiff2pdf ?", by Bob Friesenhahn

tiff2ps and tiff2pdf seem to be also good candidates for moving into archive as they have a number of reported security related issues and a significant code size. Their functionality is (at least mostly) covered by the convert utility of ImageMagick.

While the original code quality of these libtiff utilities was very poor, it should be consided that some of these utilities are used in existing processing pipelines (e.g. printing subsystems). It should also be considered that a utility like tiff2ps is 5 times more CPU efficient, and 27 times more memory efficient, than using the convert utility of ImageMagick.

The tiffcrop utility was used privately in production for years and offers some unique features and performance capabilities not found in other software. Unfortunately, modern security practices were not a consideration when it was written.

There is the possibility to create a separate project/package for these "unmaintainable" libtiff utilities in order to significantly lessen the degree of distress on libtiff itself but still allow these utilities to be maintained, and released on a different schedule and by perhaps different volunteers. To me this seems better than to create more dead source code in the libtiff package.

Bob

Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt