Giflib 4.1.6

The story so far...

I posted a new giflib-4.1.6 release over the weekend since it was brought to my attention that several seg faults were present when corrupted gif images were fed into the utilities. At the same time, I posted a notice that I was no longer going to be updating the libungif package due to the Unisys LZW patent expiring.

Today I was wondering if many people still used giflib so I had a quick look at the sourceforge statistics:

Downloads for project giflib

Date            Downloads Bandwidth
12 Nov 2007 *  	1,693  	  819.3 MB
11 Nov 2007 	2,568     1.2 GB
10 Nov 2007 	187 	  80.6 MB
09 Nov 2007 	147 	  74.1 MB

Definite bump from the release. Cool! But wait, there's more:

Downloads for Package giflib

12 Nov 2007 *  	57  	30.3 MB
11 Nov 2007 	150 	75.2 MB
10 Nov 2007 	60 	22.9 MB
09 Nov 2007 	37 	19.0 MB

Only a hundred extra people are downloading giflib now? Where are the extra two thousand downloads coming from?

Downloads for Package libungif

12 Nov 2007 *  	1,784  	862.5 MB
11 Nov 2007 	2,418 	1.1 GB
10 Nov 2007 	127 	57.7 MB
09 Nov 2007 	110 	55.0 MB

Hmm....

So despite the fact that I sent a note that libungif is now unmaintained and the fact that I did not make a new release for it this time around, everyone is rushing to download the old libungif package instead of the new giflib.

This is a little worrisome as the segfaults fixed in giflib are still present in the libungif package everyone's downloading. So here's my intarweb plea for the day:

If you actually find libungif useful, please contact me about becoming a maintainer for it. Otherwise, please switch to giflib!