I've been doing a little refactoring of gdk-pixbuf's crufty code, to see if the gripes from my braindump can be solved. For things where it is not obvious how to proceed, I've started taking more detailed notes in a gdk-pixbuf survey.
Today I was looking at which gdk-pixbuf modules are implemented by third parties, that is, which external projects provide their own image codecs pluggable into gdk-pixbuf.
And there are not that many!
The only four that I found are libheif, libopenraw, libwmf, librsvg (this last one, of course).
Update 2019/Sep/12 - Added apng, exif-raw, psd, pvr, vtf, webp, xcf.
All of those use the gdk-pixbuf module API in a remarkably similar fashion. Did they cut&paste each other's code? Did they do the simplest thing that didn't crash in gdk-pixbuf's checks for buggy loaders, which happens to be exactly what they do? Who knows! Either way, this makes future API changes in the modules a lot easier, since they all do the same right now.
I'm trying to decide between these:
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Keep modules as they are; find a way to sandbox them from gdk-pixbuf itself. This is hard because the API is "chatty"; modules and calling code go back and forth peeking at each other's structures.
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Decide that third-party modules are only useful for thumbnailers; modify them to be thumbnailers instead of generic gdk-pixbuf modules. This would mean that those formats would stop working automatically in gdk-pixbuf based viewers like EOG.
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Have "blessed" codecs inside gdk-pixbuf which are not modules so their no longer have API/ABI stability constraints. Keep third-party modules separate. Sandbox the internal ones with a non-chatty API.
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If all third-party modules work indeed as I found, the module API can be simplified quite a lot since no third-party modules implement animations or saving. If so, simplify the module API and the gdk-pixbuf internals rather drastically.
Do you know any other image formats which provide gdk-pixbuf modules? Mail me, please!