Re: GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.1.1: "Flux Capacitor"

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Something I've been meaning to bring up; we are basically going to
have to require fontconfig/Xft2 at some point. GNOME 2.2 is the
ambitious goal for that, 2.4 is the almost-certainly goal.

libgnomeprint is going to use it, the pangoft backend will use it,
gnome-terminal basically doesn't work well without it, etc. etc.
Applications and libraries need to be able to rely on the presence of
client-side fonts.

Our core X fonts code is going to bitrot and not get the right
testing, so leaving it around is kind of a false promise. The GTK+
plan is to deprecate the core X fonts backend.

Red Hat Linux 8 is fontconfig-based, and rumor has it that Ximian
GNOME 2 will be.

The main problem I know of right now is that fontconfig/Xft2 don't end
up working 100% "out of the tarball" - here are some issues I've seen
that may or may not be fully fixed:

 - jhbuild can't figure out the fcpackage tarball in its "bootstrap"
   phase (I somewhat hacked this, and sent a patch to jamesh a while
   ago)
 - tarballs install out of prefix (there's a configure option to 
   fix this but it's a nonstandard one people may not find)
 - the include files aren't properly subdirectory-fied, we have a
   patch in Red Hat packages for this, but you can get confusion 
   with Xft1 or something by default
 - the default installed configuration resulted in micro-1-pixel fonts
   for me

Anyway, we should probably have a go at getting fontconfig/Xft2
working out-of-box on non-fontconfig/Xft2 systems, Jeff maybe you
could use GARNOME to experiment?

If we can get them working reliably from the tarballs without
requiring people to edit fonts.conf, then we can just add these as a
dependency and be done with it.

Havoc