pngcheck version 3.0.2 of 31 January 2021

This version fixes one more (probable) security vulnerability discovered by
Ben Beasley of the Fedora Linux project (who also supplied the fix last month,
oops...).  Again, our thanks!

I've also updated the MinGW32 cross-compiler makefile for both Win32 and Win64
targets (i.e., there are two such makefiles now), but other than verifying
that binaries come out the other end, these are COMPLETELY UNTESTED.  In
particular, the printf() format "%td" for ptrdiff_t (pointer differences, i.e.,
subtraction) doesn't appear to be supported under Windows, but I don't know
what the appropriate type is.  So the five affected print statements presumably
just won't work correctly.

Here's a list of the major enhancements since version 1.98, which was the
last release before I took over maintenance:

 - zlib support (to test the compressed stream and, optionally, to print
   out the image's row filters)
 - support for all remaining known PNG chunks (conformance)
 - complete support for all known MNG and JNG chunks (informational)
 - extended support for printing palettes (includes transparency info and
   histograms)
 - optional color (text) output
 - improved error-checking
 - info on the compression factor of the image (expressed as a percentage,
   where 0% is no compression and 100% would be total compression; note that
   this can be negative since it counts PNG's chunk overhead against the
   compression factor)
 - png-fix-IDAT-windowsize utility
 - pngsplit utility
 - compilation support for Win32 (using MSVC), RISC OS, and Amiga

Also, this "anti-enhancement" occurred in version 3.0.0 for security reasons:

 - -f ("force continuation after major errors") option REMOVED

There are also many fixes, of course, including ones from Tom Lane, Glenn
Randers-Pehrson, Tom Zerucha, Paul Matzke, Darren Salt, John Bowler, and
others.  Thanks also to Chris Nokleberg (brokensuite), Tim Pritlove, Bob
Friesenhahn, the GraalOnline folks, giantbranch, Ben Beasley, and others for
test images.  See the included CHANGELOG file for the complete, detailed list
of who did what.

Note that while MNG support is now complete in the sense of covering all
registered chunk types, there are still numerous error conditions that
pngcheck won't detect, plus a few non-error conditions that it will flag
erroneously.  Some of those can and will be fixed (particularly the latter
class), but many of them involve complex interactions between different
chunk types and would require virtually a full MNG decoder engine, something
that is unlikely ever to happen in pngcheck.  In other words, consider
pngcheck a handy MNG debugging tool but not a full validator.  Use it in
conjunction with the MNG specification and a libmng-based viewer for best
results.  (PNG support, on the other hand, is pretty solid.)  Also use
zlib 1.2.x for best results--older versions failed to detect a number of
invalid deflate/zlib conditions, including out-of-range LZ77 distance codes.

Originally I had hoped to add support for EBCDIC-based systems (and perhaps
UTF-16 and UTF-32-based ones, if there are any for which "char" defaults to
more than 8 bits), but there doesn't seem to be much point in that anymore.
I'd still kind of like to extend the zlib support to include zTXt, iTXt, iCCP,
etc., but given the pace of recent years ("nonexistent" would be fair), folks
should definitely not hold their breath waiting for that.  Similarly, the code
could do a better job with chunks whose data exceed the buffer size, and in
general, immense if-else blocks (e.g., > 3000 lines) are extremely nasty and
should be rewritten, but...yeah.  The gap between 2.3.0 and 2.4.0 (the two
previous releases) was bigger than that between 2.3.0 and the creation of the
PNG format itself. :-/  (Did we mention that PNG turned 25 in 2020?)

But if there ever are additional updates, you might find them here:

    http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/apps/pngcheck.html

Greg Roelofs
http://gregroelofs.com/greg_contact.html
