Re: Heads up on Pango HEAD

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 14 o'clock on Jun 5, Erwann Chenede wrote:

> - pango has now a full dependency on fontconfig.
>   (As a side question why is fontconfig using expat instead of libxml)

The FT2 and Xft modules depend on fontconfig.  fontconfig uses expat 
because it is 1/6th the size of libxml2 and has no dependency on iconv.  
I'd like to get fontconfig able to use the SAX interface in libxml2 but
I don't have the time right now. 

> - pango has now a full dependency on xft.
>   (which in turn as a dependency the XRender extension)

The Xft module depends on Xft (oddly enough).

Xft2 doesn't depend on Render -- it can draw text on legacy X servers, AA 
text with GetImage/PutImage and non-AA text with cheaper requests.

> So this mean effectively mean that pango will only work on XFree, right ?

No; fontconfig and Xft2 are to be released separately from XFree.

> If so is there a way/plan to make these dependencies conditional to make
> pango and therefore all GNOME 2.0 applications work on other X servers ? 
> (Yes, you are right, I'm thinking about Sun's X Server).

There is no need to make them conditional; all of the infrastructure 
needed can be supplied along with Gnome to run on Sun's X Server.  When
Sun's X server incorporates the Render extension, AA text will just get 
faster.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab