- Package:
- src:libgnustep-gui0.27
- Source:
- libgnustep-gui0.27
- Submitter:
- Andreas Metzler
- Date:
- 2025-11-19 19:29:03 UTC
- Severity:
- important
Hello, this package uses GifQuantizeBuffer() from giflib. The symbol has been dropped in giflib 5.2 (libgif-dev/libgif7 5.2.1 is available in experimental) and therefore the package a) stops working when the gif library package is upgraded and b) if built against libgif-dev >= 5.2 then GIF support is disabled/limited. I do not think giflib did the right thing by dropping the symbol without a soname bump but that is beside the point.[1] Even with the correct way (giflib soname bump) this package loses gif support. I am quite confident that GifQuantizeBuffer() will not be reintroduced - It was ripped out to "reduce libgif size and attack surface". I am reporting this /now/ with severity important, but please treat it as rc issue. cu Andreas [1] I have suggested to upstream to do a soname bump. If this is not accepted we will probably end up with newer libgif7 having a Breaks for GifQuantizeBuffer()-using-software. ------------------------ checking for QuantizeBuffer... no checking for GifQuantizeBuffer... no
I simply forgot about this old bug. I don't think it's still relevant: $ objdump -T /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgif.so.7.2.0 | grep GifQuantizeBuffer 00000000000069d0 g DF .text 0000000000000707 Base GifQuantizeBuffer Right?
Good morning, Upstream giflib has dropped the symbol. The Debian packages have been patched to re-introduce it. So no, this bug is still relevant. cu Andreas
Andreas Metzler wrote: Oh, thanks for the pointer. I took a closer look and it's an obscure feature lost which is already marked as experimental and basically unused. GNUstep upstream is aware of the change in giflib. To verify, I rebuilt giflib with revert-GifQuantizeBuffer-remove-from-lib.patch giflib_quantize-header.patch removed and GifQuantizeBuffer deleted from the .symbols file. Then rebuilt gnustep-gui and installed the library package. Viewing GIF files with preview.app and price.app works and that's what is important. So you can safely exclude gnustep-gui from the list of problematic packages that are affected by this change.