Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

AbiWord 2.3.0 has been released a last week. It is the first development version for our upcoming 2.4.0 release.

There won't be a MacOS X build for that release. Wait for 2.3.1 as we have been lagging behind a bit.

Since manufacturer do not want to do that, for some non-obvious reason, it is a good niche for open source software: a unified RAW file library.

The idea would be to write a library to decode and convery RAW files as well as their metadata, because currently there is information spread accross several projects, not one source.

• First, turn Dave Coffin's dcraw into a library. Dave does not want to do that and tell to just call dcraw in a pipe or call it's main() from the code. While this is sufficient for just decoding the image, it is not enough to decode the metadata. dcparse has the basic bits to do that... and contain duplicated code too.

• Wonderland.org spreadsheet or the CRW file analysis, accompagnied with Dave Burren Canon MakerNote would help filling the gaps, as well as Sven Riedel crwinfo

• Daniel Stephens has a NEF decoder, DeNEF, that can be used to help filling the gaps on the Nikon side

• exifprobe and libexif would help providing these meta data as EXIF data.

I'd be in favor of using GPL just because I dislike that commercial and proprietary software author just shop for these libraries without giving anything back.

And then we'd have to convince everyone to use it.