Alpha Channel & OpenCV (Feature #217)

I am currently using OpenCV with Qt interface (more option than the simple highgui interface), this work well however it doesn't handle correctly the transparency. In Qt if the transparency is 0 the image is not show!

Therefore I wanted to ask if we could add few functionalities to the next OpenCV release (2.1 or 2.2?):

• Add to cvLoadImage and cvDecode the CV_LOAD_IMAGE_COLOR_ALPHA define which could directly create an image in BGRA with the alpha channel
  set to the alpha value defined by PNG or GIF image and with the alpha value set to 255 (NOT ZERO) for other format like JPEG.
• Write a new type of cvCvtColor like CV_BGR2BGRA255 to convert directly with alpha channel to 255 (NOT ZERO).
  I don't know how to name this function because if image is on float alpha max the default value should be 1.
• Tell me if there is a function to set all the values of a channel to a specific value like cvSetData().