[giflib-devel] State of the giflib code - what else can I remove?

[<es...@th...>]

The giflib codebase badly needed to be brought into the 21st century.
Significant portions of it were obsolete and a maintainance burden, and
the C it was written in was a rather archaic dialect tangled with platform
#ifdefs - so old that it didn't rely on having void * or fixed-width types.  

I've already fixed a lot of the more obvious problems simply by
ripping out a lot of obsolescent code.  C99 and Single Unix
Specification give us better ways to do cross-platform things that
used to take a lot of platform-specific headers. I've also dropped
a couple of utilities, gif2epsn and gif2iris, that targeted obsolete
hardware.

The only potentially user-visible change to the library so far is that
the undocumented DumpScreen2Gif() entry point is gone.  Most of that
code was certainly obsolete, targeting things like EGA graphic cards
(!).  Only the X case might still have worked, and I'm doubtful about
even that much.  Ripping it out solved about 80% of the remaining
portability problems.

The remaining 20% are concentrated in a small number of files that
I'm wondering if I should just drop. 

1, gif2x11.  Do we really need to carry an X viewer in the  giflib 
distribution?  There are enough of those that I'm inclined to let
that be somebody else's problem.

2. The Game Boy Advanced support.  What's up with that?  Was it ever
documented? The product was discontinued in 2008 - is there any reason
to consider it relevant to future giflib releases?

3. The files in the windows/ directory.  Where are these documented?  
Why are we carrying them?  I see the code dates from 1999; is there
any reason to believe anyone is still using it?
--
						>>esr>>