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In fairness I can see it from the libpng guy's perspective. It will make their library larger and potentially less fit for a certain purpose.

Why hasn't someone forked libpng, added the apng patch and then made it available for WebKit? Then everyone is happy. Just needs a middle-man.

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No need to fork libpng. Currently, vanilla libpng and apng patch are both hosted on sourceforge, and it's trivial to automatically download both and apply the patch. In fact, a few distros (Arch, Gentoo, Mandriva, FreeBSD) already do exactly that for their libpng packages.

But keep in mind that apng patch only adds a few functions to libpng API, and it's entirely up to applications to actually use those API calls to request extra frames.

Because then the upkeep and maintenance of the PNG library for webkit relies on a middle-man.

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