But its not required to run Joomla - only for the jimage constructor

On 9 October 2016 at 11:50, Demis Palma ツ notifications@github.com wrote:

The official Technical Requirements
https://www.joomla.org/about-joomla/technical-requirements.html no
longer reflect the current state of the actual development.

JImage depends on GD library, which is rather common, but it's not
installed by default with PHP. JImage constructor checks for the
availability of GD library and stops the execution if the library is not
present.

The Technical Requirements should be updated accordingly, mentioning that
GD library is required to run Joomla.

—
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
#12362, or mute the thread
https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABPH8b7S0fMl-P3mFug3wbRwQN2cIUNCks5qyMcSgaJpZM4KR-LV
.

Brian Teeman
Co-founder Joomla! and OpenSourceMatters Inc.
https://brian.teeman.net/ http://brian.teeman.net/

Yes, but instantiating a JImage object would result in an execution stop.
After checking deeper into that, it turns out that JImage belongs to the platform, and Joomla does not make use of it.
Therefore no, GD library is not a requirement to run Joomla.

I think it would be worthwhile though to document "optional" requirements; things that are required to run different aspects of the API but aren't a hard requirement to install and run Joomla as a whole, even if they are part of the default PHP configuration (since a lot of things could be removed with the right configuration switches). Stuff like ext/mcrypt is required to use JCrypt's ciphers, ext/gd is needed to run JImage, ext/ldap for the LDAP client, or ext/openssl to use JKeychain. Or even configurations that offer a performance benefit like having ext/mbstring enabled for the phputf8 library to use native functions. For the Framework we started doing this with the Composer manifests and its "suggest" section.

I'd probably add this to our docs wiki though over the base tech requirements page since that's going to be a lot of possible text depending how deep we went into that (like if we wanted to spell out requirements for each of the possible cache and session handlers).

See joomla/joomla-websites#708 - I think this should be a page on one of our sites, so at least there's a task open for it.