bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image

[Xah Lee]

Hi Eli & other GNU Emacs developers,

perhaps this is controversial... but doesn't FSF people want GNU Emacs to be 
working out of the box on Windows?

it is trivial to include the dll libs for images.

The other recent bug is about ftp not working out of the box on GNU Emacs 
binary for Windows downloaded from FSF site, whereas Lennart's EmacsW32 
distribution includes a Open source ftp binary that fixed the problem.

I feel that it would be great for all features of emacs work out of the box 
as much as possible for platforms that are supported by FSF.

Since FSF does develope a version of emacs that works for Windows... i don't 
understand if there is a reason to not include these DLLs?

The only reason i can think of is that perhaps FSF prefer emacs to be work 
well for GNU/Linux and does not take extra steps to make it work as well for 
“non-free” Windows. If this is the reason to not include image library DLLs 
for Windows, i feel this perhaps damaging to the spread of FSF philosophy, 
since many Windows people who tries emacs and just find it not working in 
many situations. For example, Visual Basic and PHP today are perhaps the 
most used languages if one count the pencentage of number of programers for 
these langs.

btw, I should mention this message is just meant to address this image dll 
issue pertaining this bug report, not meant to argue about philosophy or 
best approach to FSF philosophy. I feel that a binary version of Emacs for 
Windows downloaded from FSF's official site and not able to open image files 
is something like a show-stopper bug.

Thanks.

 Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>
To: "Xah Lee" <xah@xahlee.org>; <4367@emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com>
Cc: <jasonr@gnu.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2009 9:13 AM
Subject: Re: bug#4367: 23.1; unable to view this png image


> > From: "Xah Lee" <xah@xahlee.org>
> > Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 20:32:37 -0700
> > Cc: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> >
> > Not sure what you mean updating libpng, since this is on Windows, i 
> > presume
> > any png lib is included in emacs...
>
> No, they are not.  The only image library shipped with the precompiled
> binary distribution is libXpm, because without it you don't have the
> color icons on the toolbar buttons.  The other image libraries need to
> be installed separately.
>
> > or, humm... does this mean if i don't
> > have libpng program installed separated on Windows then emacs won't open
> > image files?
>
> You won't be able to see PNG image files in Emacs, yes.  And libpng is
> a DLL, not a program.
>
> See the value of image-library-alist for the possible image libraries
> Emacs supports for each image type.  You need to have at least one
> installed for each type, to be able to visit images of that type