Future of TclMagick - seeking maintainer

[Rolf Schroedter]

Somebody of you perhaps noticed that TclMagick has not been
significantly updated since about two years. The reason is that neither
I nor David Welton are in a position to actively maintain TclMagick.

So the main goal of this posting is to seek for people interested in
maintaining the future development of TclMagick.

An important point in this aspect is that ImageMagick(IM) and
GraphicsMagick(GM) are diverging quickly. While GM has a quite stable
API, IM is evolving rather dynamically (added ~170 new functions during
the last 2 years, total of ~500 API's). Many of these new API's add new
options to existing methods rather than new functionality.

Currently TclMagick is hosted in the GM CVS-repository and supports
methods common to both IM & GM. For the future of TclMagick it has to be
discussed which way to go:
- Support both IM & GM, hiding the differences behind the Tcl-API
- Support only one of IM or GM
- Diverge TclMagick into a Tcl_IM and a Tcl_GM

The question of diverging TclMagick came up, when Pete Hardie recently
added ~66 new IM-API's to TclMagick, trying to automate this process.
These changes turned out to be incompatible to GM. Perhaps Pete will
post his results to c.l.t soon.

I personally would prefer to see TclMagick support both IM+GM or only
the stable GM-API (least amount of work). But finally this decision
depends on the preferences of a new maintainer (if any).

Regards,
Rolf.