bug#963: no support for viewing bmp images?

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> writes:

> I remember seeing them in stuff like tutorials for how to load an
> image in <foo> language and suchlike.  Perhaps I saw was some Scheme
> stuff a couple of years ago where the examples used BMP...?  I can't
> remember exactly.  It might have been PNG too, to be honest.
>
> I still think it would be a nice little feature to have.  But I won't
> protest if this is closed as wontfix either.

Yeah, I think this is one of those image formats we'll just have to
defer users to ImageMagick if they want to see...

This reminds me: Since we don't really want to point users towards
compiling with ImageMagick due to security concerns -- would it make
sense to write a shim over external utilities to handle exotic formats?
I mean, it would just have to call "convert" in a temp buffer to some
format we do handle (like PNG).

But I guess that doesn't really deal with the security issue, as buffer
overflows in "convert" will do pretty much the same as in Emacs.  But it
would lead to fewer segfaults in Emacs itself, so perhaps it's worth
doing?  It'd be a pretty trivial shim, and we could deprecate compiling
with ImageMagick for sure.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no