VipsScaler/status

Last update on: 2013-08-monthly

2011-11-30
Tim Starling and Antoine Musso reviewed the VipsScaler extension, written by Bryan Tong Minh to use VIPS as an alternative, and possible replacement, for ImageMagick as image thumbnailing system. Bryan and Antoine also wrote a comparison tool, [//test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:VipsTest enabled on the test2 wiki], to test both systems. The initial deployment is planned to be limited to images that would give an error with ImageMagick (for instance large PNG files).

2011-12-07
Planned deployment of VipsScaler for TIFFs happening on December 11th.

2011-12-31
VIPS hasn't proven as effective at saving memory on large PNG files as what was expected, but it has shown improvements for large TIFFs. Deployment to Wikimedia sites is deferred until MediaWiki 1.19 is deployed. Bryan Tong Minh will reach out to upstream developers to include fixes for PNG and JPG files.

2012-01-03
Deferred until after 1.19 deployment. Bryan Tong Minh will be working with the upstream developers on fixing the problems we found during the test deployment. VIPS will be used for TIFF images after 1.19 without the need for upstream fixes, but PNG and JPG will have to wait for upstream fixes.

2013-08-monthly
This month saw a significant change to the structure and organization of browser tests, with tests and builds for CirrusSearch, UniversalLanguageSelector, and VisualEditor following the example of MobileFrontend and now residing in the git repositories for those extensions, rather than in the /qa/browsertests repository. This creates opportunities for more frequent and more accurate Jenkins builds of the tests, while also reducing the overhead required for analyzing test failures.