merging imread and imwrite

[John W. Eaton]

On 31-Jan-2008, John W. Eaton wrote:

| Has anyone looked at DevIL (http://openil.sourceforge.net)?  It is
| LGPL and there are Debian packages and apparently RPM files and a
| Windows build.  What about the licenses of the dependencies?  They
| must also be GPL compatible.
| 
| It also seems to have functions available for displaying images with
| OpenGL, which I assume would fit nicely with the new graphics
| features.

OK, I looked, and while it is smaller than the Magick++ library, it
also uses an unusual method of managing images.  I think I would much
prefer to work with the classes provided by Magick++.  Using reference
counted images seems much more natural to me than having a database of
images indexed by names.

Maybe the Magick++ library could be split into smaller pieces?  Or
maybe it doesn't really matter, as even with all the dependencies it
is just a few megabytes and memory is cheap these days (right?).

jwe