= libpng =
== Description ==
libpng is the official PNG reference library. It supports almost all PNG
features, is extensible, and has been extensively tested for over 13 years.
The home site for development versions (i.e., may be buggy or subject to
change or include experimental features) is http://libpng.sourceforge.net/,
and the place to go for questions about the library is the png-mng-implement
mailing list.
Website: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html
== License ==
The libpng license - see http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-LICENSE.txt
== SPKG Maintainers ==
* William Stein
== Upstream Contact ==
The png mailing lists - see http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngmisc.html#lists
== Dependencies ==
This spkg depends on:
* libz
== Special Update/Build Instructions ==
* No changes went into src. There are two different tarballs, but we use the
one with configure.
* On Darwin, the symbolic links libpng.* created by libpng12 may interfere
with a system-wide libPng.dylib.
This system-wide library is likely to be a different version and on top of
that the symbols exported there are prefixed with "_cg" (for "Core Graphics"),
so even if by chance the functionalities of the two libraries were interchangeable,
libraries or applications looking for one and being presented the other won't
find the symbols they expect.
Note the uppercase "P" which could prevent this conflict; unfortunately, the
default filesystem used by Apple is case-insensitive.
Also note there would be no problem if the system-wide library was not looked
for when Sage is being built or run, but that's not the case either;
it is at least looked for by the "ImageIO" framework:
- when Python is built with Mac OS extensions, fixed in #4008;
- when Mercurial is built because it uses $EDITOR, cf. #4678;
- when R is built and it finds -lpng, cf. #4409 and #11696.
As not all of these problems are easily dealt with and new ones may arise,
we chose to delete the $SAGE_LOCAL/lib/libpng.* symlinks on Darwin.
Therefore, some package as matplotlib (cf. #11686) which by default looks for
-lpng are patched to look for -lpng12 (unless pkg-config is installed; in
this case indeed we can use a non-conflicting libpng.pc symlinking to
libpng12.pc).
