Re: [Texmacs-dev] gif license

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Sun, 11 May 2003, Martin Costabel wrote:
> David Allouche wrote:
> > On Sun, May 11, 2003 at 10:50:45AM +0200, Michèle Garoche wrote:
> >
> >>So, that's a problem if they are gif files, as we are not supposed to
> >>use gif files (license), are we? They were integrated last year by
> >
> >
> > This is software patent problem over the LZW algorithm used in GIF.
>
> Apart from that, texmacs' problem with these is that it doesn't treat
> files with the wrong extension correctly.

Are we really to blame for that? If the extension is not recognized,
then we use a heuristic in order to determine the file type
(the heuristic has not been implemented for images so far;
see src/Data/Convert/Generic/which_format.cc).
We might generalize that, but I am not sure whether this
would be a good idea, since the heuristics might not be reliable.