As seen on comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing.  Liam had been having
problems with PNG's generated by POV-Ray crashing the GIMP.  Thought
folks here might be interested.  I'm not sure how much this affects
other applications beyond the GIMP, so I'm not forwarding this to any
other groups.

Liam Devlin wrote:

> Hi,
>         I am able to create files in tga and ppm format so the problem is
> definitely with the PNG library, specifically, interaction between
> POV-Ray and the installed library. I am able to convert the generated
> ppm images to png without error. My libpng version is libpng.so.2.1.0.5.

libpng-1.0.6 (the latest, fresh from the official web site, released
just a few weeks ago) yields libpng.so.2.1.0.6.  When I compile POV-Ray
to use libpng.so.2.1.0.5 (which is what comes with Red Hat 6.2, for
instance), I produce PNG's that crash the GIMP 1.0.4 (but not various
other programs, e.g. Netscape 4.7.2, ee 0.3.11, GQview 0.7.0).  When I
downloaded and compiled libpng-1.0.6 (and zlib 1.1.3) in the POV-Ray
source directory and modified the makefile to build using those versions
(static, FWIW) rather than the ones in /usr/lib, I ended up with a
binary that produced PNG's that don't crash the GIMP.  I installed the
new libraries, recompiled POV-Ray to use the them, and those worked
fine, too.

Resolution: upgrade to the new libpng, and your problems go away. 
Currently, the problems seem to be limited to a few appliciations, but
I'll eventually want to update the version of libpng that gets
distributed with the POV-Ray source.

-Mark Gordon

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