Why are PhotoSauce.NativeCodecs.* being released as 'preview' versions?

[djunko-developer]

I couldn't find any information on this in the repository, so why are the NuGet packages for the projects PhotoSauce.NativeCodecs.* in preview version?
It's understandable for the PhotoSauce.NativeCodecs.Libjxl project, but the others?

[saucecontrol]

That's a good question.

I guess the main reason is that the native codec packages have less testing overall than the main library or the Windows codecs that are enabled by default. Those Windows codecs are validated by Microsoft and integrate through a single consistent set of native interfaces (WIC), while the native codec plugins work with abstractions I personally developed.

I have attempted to build each of those native codec wrappers in a way that maximizes functionality, performance, and stability. However, the underlying libraries vary in quality. e.g. libjpeg-turbo is extremely stable; libheif is... less so.

It's tempting to assume that the numbers of downloads of those packages vs numbers of issues logged indicates that they're stable and safe, but I don't have any detailed info on usage. For example, I have a basic test suite I run to make sure the codec packages work on Linux, but neither I nor any of my support contract clients (that I know of) run on Linux in production.

All that is to say, I don't know of any reason they shouldn't be used in production, but I don't want to give the impression that they're at the same level of stability as the main library and the WIC integrations, because I just don't know.

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Open questions for users of the native codec plugins:

• Are you running them in production environments?
• Which plugins specifically do you use?
• What's your environment (runtime version and platform)?
• What kind of processing volume do you do?
• Do you use them with untrusted inputs? And if so, do you do any sanitation/validation before processing?