GIF support

[Michael A. Peters]

With respect to gif support -

In php it is needed.
This is not because you can't just as easily create png images, but
because php is capable of opening and manipulating existing images.

You could I suppose use gif2png to first create a png image and THEN
manipulate it - but KISS applies.

There are plenty of web apps out there that take an image uploaded from
the end user sitting at home to do whatever they do - and a lot of those
images will be gif images.

Back in the php 4.0 days - adding gif support to php was as easy as
patching gif support back into gd and then building php - it would
detect the gif support and your gd module for php would support gifs.

While speaking of gifs - LZW support should be patched back into libtiff
if it hasn't already been - the upstream maintainer has a patch for that
on his site.

The gd developer seems to want nothing to do with gif - but some Ausie
maintains a patch for gif in gd. I *think* new php won't auto detect gif
in configure anymore, so that needs to be patched for php to have gif
support.

lzw is a good algorithm - it would be a shame if the bad blood from
Unisys prevented its use now that the algorithm is finally free.