Licensing issue in prebuilt binaries, support for tile-based output will be (temporarily) removed

[lovell]

From v0.32.0 onwards, the prebuilt binaries provided by sharp will unfortunately no longer allow the ability to generate tile-based deep zoom output, a situation I'm hoping will be temporary.

https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com/api-output#tile

sharp uses libgsf for this feature, and I recently uncovered some ambiguity around libgsf licensing. It is now officially LGPL-2.1-only, so from the next release the prebuilt binaries will remove libgsf as it is incompatible with licences used by sharp, libheif and freetype. More details are available upstream at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libgsf/-/issues/28

Anyone relying on this feature is very welcome to help get things working again, ideally with a PR - please see libvips/libvips#3354

In the meantime, for access to this feature, you'll need to compile your own libvips with support for libgsf. Please remember that using libgsf in the same process as freetype, ImageMagick or libheif may introduce a licensing mismatch/risk.

Helping with libvips/libvips#3354 is the best next step.

[ianengelbrecht]

Thank you for this note, I was scratching my head as to why the tile function worked when I installed Sharp a few months ago, but not now! According to libvips/libvips#3468 it's only the Windows prebuilt binaries that don't have libgsf.

So I've now installed the previous version of libvips (8.14.1) and confirmed that it still has libgsf by running vips dzsave on the command line. My question then is how do I get npm install sharp to detect that there is a globally installed libvips now? I've added the libvips bin directory to my PATH but that doesn't seem to work.

[lovell]

@ianengelbrecht For Windows, I suggest you pin sharp to v0.31.3. For further help, please open a new issue.

https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com/changelog#v0320---24th-march-2023

Prebuilt binaries: support for tile-based output temporarily removed due to licensing issue.

https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com/install#custom-libvips

The use of a globally-installed libvips is unsupported on Windows

[DanaGoghberg]

Any news on this issue?

[lovell]

Please subscribe to this issue and optionally the linked issue at libvips/libvips#3354 for updates.

[lovell]

Support for tile-based output has been restored in the prebuilt binaries provided by v0.32.4, which is now available.