Exiv2

No trouble at all, Bob. I'll post them later today at http://clanmills.com/files/exiv2-0-19.zip. (probably around 20:00UTC on 20100411).

Robin, yet again, you are my hero :D Thank you.

Bob Davies wrote:

Robin, yet again, you are my hero :D Thank you.
Bob

I've been called many things in my life and I'm sure this is the first time anybody called me "my hero". Thanks.

This is a "Universal" build (ppc, i386 and x86_64) of libexiv2.6.dylib and exiv2. The file "ReadMe.txt" in the archive contains information about how the build was achieved and I hope that's useful for anybody who wishes to build other configurations such as the a static library or another architecture: for example ppc64.

Am I correct in thinking that if I include this in a firefox extension wouldn't work unless the end-user already has required libraries installed on their mac, as it's not a static build?

It is a dynamic library. However I believe the dependancies are already provided by Apple as 'standard':

605 /usr/local/lib $ otool -L libexiv2.6.dylib
libexiv2.6.dylib:
/usr/local/lib/libexiv2.6.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 7.0.0)
/usr/lib/libiconv.2.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 7.0.0)
/usr/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.3)
/usr/lib/libexpat.1.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 7.0.0)
/usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 7.4.0)
/usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 111.1.5)
606 /usr/local/lib $
So I would expect that you can link the library from a Firefox extension.

If however you determine that you must have a static library (perhaps it's easier to install a single binary object into Firefox), then there are several possibilities:

1) I add the 'universal' static library to the archive
2) You build a static library using the information in ReadMe.txt
3) You can link your extension to libexiv2.6.dylib and install them together into a single directory in Firefox. When you do this, you'll probably have to use install_name_tool to get your extension and library to respect each other. I'll be happy to discuss this off-line (robin@clanmills.com) if you'd like to know more about this.

I must confess it's wayyy over my head :/ I tried building the universals myself previously and cannot wrap my head around it (that's why I code firefox extensions, javascript is sooo much simpler ;)
Any chance you could add the static library to the archive please?

Bob. I'll try to find time to build the static libraries on on Monday.

Bob. I've added the static/universal build. So now you can use the static or the dynamic library.

http://clanmills.com/files/exiv2-0-19.zip.

Can you email directly if there's some difficulty with the build. I'd prefer not to discuss my mistakes in public!

Robin

That's awesome :) I've run a few tests on my failtest files (it seems something in adobe bridge is/was writing poorly encoded tags, hence the need for the improvements in .19), and everything seems to have run through perfectly. Have it running well now on 0.19 for windows, mac & linux :D
Thank you very much for taking the time to build it, huuugely appreciated by both me, and the ever-increasingly thin hair left on my scalp ;)
Bob

That's great, Bob. We aim to please. No that's true: I hope to please.

If it's not confidential, perhaps you could share/explain what you are doing.

Samuel (from London) is an occasional contributor to this forum and also found it difficult to build for the Mac. He also has a Firefox plugin. If you'd like to 'give back' to the community, I'm sure Samuel would appreciate a little help and encouragement. http://dev.exiv2.org/boards/3/topics/show/236

It's part of a pretty bulky extension for organising, categorising, and automatically distributing images for sale to microstock sites.
I'm releasing it for public beta next week (almost a year of development now :D)
There's a current (but much simpler) toolbar out at http://www.picNiche.com/toolbar/
I'll drop info and links (inc download link) here so people can see how I've used the exiv for the three platforms after the release of the new stuff next week :D

For any who's interested my firefox extension which uses exiv2 can be found here:
http://picniche.com/toolbar/imagedeck/
And a bigger description/video etc here:
http://picniche.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/introducing-the-picniche-image-deck-open-beta/
The binary components (exiv2) are called from the backgroundapi.js file if anyone wants to take a look how it's called etc. To get to the source, just unzip the .xpi file, everything is in there.
I'm hoping eventually to rebuild into an XPCOM component, but that's a bit beyond me at the moment, so just stuck with the call-model as is for now.