Re: the big jump forward

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 16:28 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> 2005/9/23, Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>:
> > ...for the memory reduction efforts is getting closer.
> >
> > Yesterday, we tracked down and fixed the last major regression
> > in the mmap-cache branch of fontconfig, so it should be
> > ready for wider testing now. If some fearless hackers jump in
> > to help testing and debugging, we can hopefully squash the
> > remaining bugs in a short time and have a great memory-reduced
> > fontconfig 2.4 in time for Gnome 2.14.
> >
> > Patrick will do a test release soon, or you can directly go
> > to the fc-2_4_branch in cvs
> > (:pserver:anoncvs cvs freedesktop org:/cvs/fontconfig).
> 
> I definitely consider myself fearless, and have no second thoughts on
> scrapping my system (which is mostly self-built anyway), but I'm not
> exactly sure what I'll be looking for?
> 
> Just memory leaks?
> 
> Do I need to have extensive configuration for fontconfig in order to
> conjure misbehaviour? If so, can someone provide me with one?-)
> 
> Any other pointers?
> 

The problems we have tracked down since I started playing with the
mmap branch were:

- all GTK+ applications crashing at startup in Pango
- gnome-terminal coming up with an unchangable font size of 1
- gnome-font-properties not displaying the font samples

So in general, I would watch out for applications that don't start
anymore, or display different fonts than they used to. It would also
be useful to verify that the cache files can be used across different
platforms (the cache format is not actually platform independent, it
stores a platform-specific copy of the data for each platform on which
fc-cache has been run).

Matthias