
INFORMATION SPECIFIC TO THE TIFF PACKAGE
========================================

The tiff upstream maintainers have a tendency to make mistakes that
introduce binary incompatibility between one version of tiff and
another.  In order to verify binary compatibility, it is strongly
recommended to build a new library and install the new library without
installing the new tools.  Then test the tools with the test images
provided by upstream.

Additionally, when checking the sources to look for ABI changes, you
must check both the public header files (tiff.h and tiffio.h) and the
source file libtiff/tif_dirinfo.c which maps tag names to types.
Changes in the tag name to type mapping also result in binary
incompatibility because of the field setting and getting functions
using variable arguments.

Until tiff4 is released, debian's soname is out of step with
upstreams.  For each new release, it will be necessary to update
soname.patch.

The tiff packages get a fair number of security-related bug reports.
In the interest of keeping the quality of the tiff software as high as
possible, it's good for the debian and Red Hat maintainers to be in
touch.  As of this writing, the Red Hat maintaner, Tom Lane, agrees.
The latest Red Hat package can be found here:

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/development/source/SRPMS/

You can also see their CVS:

http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/libtiff/

 -- Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>, Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:33:28 -0400
