Re: [Render] question!

[Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimir ximian com>]

On 08 Feb 2001 23:24:03 -0500, Jonathan LaCour wrote:
> Everyone,
> 
> I just saw the following post on the Render mailing list.  I was
> wondering if this was true, and if it was why it isn't offered as an
> optional package in Ximian Gnome for Debian?  I understand the stability
> issues at hand, but I am willing to play with bleeding edge software.  I
> really think that the backport of GTK with Render would be very nice and
> useful!


We would definitively like to make this patch available to our users,
but we
don't want to require the availability of libXft/libXrender libraries.
We'll be working
to clean up the patch, such that it doesn't link with the Xft/Xrender
libraries, but
dlopen()'s them as available, and also to resolve some memory leak
issues.  We
might make some prelimiary debs and rpms available soon, so that people
who are
interested could give it a try (we're in the middle of a company move
right now, so things will be hectic for the next few days).  The
difficulty lies in that patches are required to gtk+, gnome-libs, and
gal; and also that a number of applications and utilities access the
GdkFontPrivate structure directly and as such will crash if they are not
modified. Luckily, the number of such applications is low -- the XFT
support itself is enabled by a GDK_USE_XFT environment variable, so for
those applications simply setting it to 0 fixes the problem. (It's
surprising that even something like the desk guide applet crashes...)

Anyway, as soon as we make some more progress, I'll post a message on
the Render
mailing list.

I also have Mozilla running antialiased, but -that- patch is even less
ready for prime
time than the Gdk patch is (on which it depends).  But it sure looks
pretty ;-)


    - Vlad