Bug#561923: grub-pc: Automatically convert background images to suitable format

[Alexander Kurtz]

Am Mittwoch, den 26.01.2011, 14:36 +0000 schrieb Colin Watson:
> My main concern is that in future I want GRUB_GFXMODE to be dynamic,
> detected from VBE at boot time (it's already this way in Ubuntu).  This
> means that userspace wouldn't know what size to convert to.

That's a valid argument against doing automatic conversions. I've got
two more:

 a) Adding ImageMagick as an extra dependency would pull in over 100 
    additional packages with a total size of over 50 MB. I don't think
    this is desirable, especially as the benefit wouldn't be that large.

 b) Adding support for using ImageMagick to 05_debian_theme only if
    available would make the code much more complicated and add a 
    number of special cases. Consider the following example:

    The background image is directly readable by GRUB: Normally no 
    caching would be necessary, but if you have ImageMagick installed 
    the picture would be automatically converted and stored 
    under /boot/grub/. This may be useful in some cases, however
    if GRUB could have read the picture without any extra conversion
    this is just a waste of (possible precious) disk space. Consequently
    we would have to add logic to determine whether converting the 
    background image is useful. I really don't think that's the task of
    a bootloader.

> Can't we do whatever conversion is needed at boot time instead?  GRUB
> has some fairly sophisticated image processing facilities nowadays.

After doing some testing, I think that there are actually no conversions
necessary. I've tested all the pictures from these paths

	/usr/share/backgrounds/cosmos/
	/usr/share/images/desktop-base/
	/usr/share/pixmaps/backgrounds/gnome/nature/

plus some private pictures from my digital camera. Apart from #611123[1]
everything worked just fine - regardless of resolution or file format of
the pictures.

IMHO this bug can be closed beginning with version 1.98-1 (this version
added support for bitmap scaling). Any objections?

Best regards

Alexander Kurtz

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=611123
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