On Wed, 2 Mar 2011, Laurențiu Păncescu wrote:
Hello Daniel,
Bob Friesenhahn, the upstream GraphicsMagick maintainer, also recommends
building GraphicsMagick with a 16-bit quantum depth [1]:
It has been a while since 2004, but today that is still my
recommendation if (almost) all the capabilities are needed. Of course
there is a memory penalty, which becomes more severe for people
dealing with high-resolution monochrome files like faxes.
Today's computers come with quite a lot more RAM and people have
become used to dealing with raw digital camera files and 16-bit/sample
TIFF files.
If you were to offer just one set of binaries,
the 16bit version would be a better offering
since it is clearly superior for some tasks
and there is more assurance that quality won't
be lost.
Bob also mentioned the 16-bit build is the one he spends most time optimizing
[2].
That is true and is a reason that the performance of the 16-bit build
does not lag as much behind the 8-bit build as it used to do. In the
GraphicsMagick 1.2 timeframe, considerable effort was put into being
able to import and export from the 16-bit samples with the best
performance.
It seems unlikely that Debian can afford to displace the existing
8-bit package since it would break existing dependencies. A parallel
installable GraphicsMagick Q16 package (with renamed shared libraries
and headers path) seems like the best path forward. Unfortunately,
the GraphicsMagick build does not currently support alternate names
for the shared libraries and headers path.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
