XF 2.2 Imagick still not installable on PHP 8.3, does XenForo recommend a fully compatible alternative(s)?

[bzcomputers]

Imagick has seen little to no development over the last few years and a current known bug makes it so the PECL extension will not install on PHP 8.3. This bug has been unaddressed since it was found over 6 months ago on PHP 8.3 release candidates.

Install error "Unterminated preprocessor conditions" in php 8.3 · Issue #640 · Imagick/imagick

The first if condition in Imagick.stub.php is not closed imagick/Imagick.stub.php Lines 5 to 8 in 28f2704 class Imagick { #if MagickLibVersion > 0x628 public function optimizeImageLayers(): bool {}...

github.com

Does XenForo recommend an alternative to Imagick that is compatible? Preferably an alternative that is seeing ongoing development.

Also, out of curiosity, what exactly does XenForo rely on Imagick for?

 

[Chris D]

We don’t rely on it but arguably it is a better library for manipulating images and I believe with a lower memory footprint. For now simply enable GD which is built in.

In real terms the only benefit to Imagick is it can resize a gif and keep its animation.

 

[Kirby]

Hmm ... ImageMagick seems to work just fine for me with PHP 8.3.6 (Debian Bullseye, Packages from https://packages.sury.org/php) - I'd expect it would also work fine with Debian Bookworm and Ubuntu 22.04/24.04

That being said, it would be nice to see support for libvips which seems both faster than ImageMagick and uses less memory