libheif: cannot view HEIC files with 1.16.2-2

[Rob Savoury]

Unable to view HEIC (HEIF) images successfully with the latest libheif 1.16.2-2 as backported to ppa:savoury1/graphics (and also copied to various other SavOS PPAs).

[Rob Savoury (savoury1)]

The latest libheif 1.16.2-2 Debian/Ubuntu package backported to ppa:savoury1/graphics (and copied to various other SavOS PPAs) the other day has some serious issues. The maintainers of libheif at Debian decided to split all the plugins out into distinct packages, rather than have all the features "built-in" with the main libheif1 library. Unfortunately though there are some real problems with this at present in the current 1.16.2 version. See:

https://github.com/strukturag/libheif/issues/914
https://github.com/strukturag/libheif/issues/933
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1041242

Even after adding the new commits that are supposed to fix issue #914 it was still not possible to successfully use external programs (ie. Geeqie, gThumb, GIMP) to load HEIC files with the new distinct libheif-plugin-* packages. It seems there are therefore other issues with using the plugin packages rather than a single library package.

So the packaging relative to splitting out plugins to distinct packages has now been reverted, meaning that all features are once again found in libheif1 and there are no libheif-plugin-* packages at all (as was the case with 1.15.1-1 backports). This has fixed the problem on test systems, allowing the successful viewing of HEIC images from within any programs with that capability.