Re: Heads up on Pango HEAD

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Arnaud Charlet <charlet ACT-Europe FR> writes:

> > 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.
> 
> I still find this never ending list of added dependencies for the *core*
> gtk very annoying. Not everyone uses GNOME, and not everyone uses Linux
> (or Solaris for that matter), so what about other systems ?

There is no relationship to GNOME here as far as I can see. (Other
than the discussion of making it possible to compile fontconfig using
libxml, which is used by GNOME and parts of KDE.)

I think the fontconfig dependency is a definite win.

 - Reducing the number of places that fonts are configured separately
   is a must.
 - Copying code into Pango, as we did for pango-1.0 with mini-xft
   is a huge maintainence problem.
 - If an app is using both the FT2 and Xft backends, using a common
   font database for both saves much time and memory.
 - fontconfig is considerably improved from the Xft font matching
   code that was copied in mini-xft.

There will be no required Xft2 dependency for pango-1.2 or GTK+-2.2,
though:

 - I *encourage* people to use Xft2 on all X platforms; what we 
   can do with Xft is a huge improvement over what we can do
   with core X; with Xft we get full access to modern font formats,
   with core X fonts, we are pushing everything over a 15 year
   old protocol.

   Xft2 gives those benefit to people not using XFree86.

 - I don't plan on spending significant time on the core X font 
   backend or shapers in the future

 - The core X backend will be dropped for pango-2.0, whenever that is.

As for the Xft dependency on the Xrender library ... well, if I expect
if enough people complain, Keith might be willing to give in and add
conditionalization. But I'd agree that the cost of allowing Xft to be
built in multiple configurations is bigger than the gain.

Regards,
                                        Owen