Re: GTK+-2.x planning

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 0 o'clock on Mar 13, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Probably overboard to call the function
> pango_this_hoses_half_the_world_shape() isn't it ;-)

My thought was just to add a function that parallels the current font/
fontset open function but takes a Fontconfig name (or XLFD if you want) and
returns an GdkFont object that draws with Xft.  Easy as pie, and provides a
trivial migration path.  The one trick is with font listing; I'm not sure 
what functions Gdk provides for listing fonts, but it's probably not very 
similar to Fontconfig...

> I just thought of one issue though, which is that -lpangox is in the
> ABI for a few years. Of course it doesn't mean that anyone has to use
> it.

If you assume shared libraries can carry dependencies to other libraries, 
then the current ABI is fine.  You don't *need* to add -lXft -lfontconfig 
-lexpat -lXrender on modern systems.  I don't know of any machines where 
this can't be made to work.

> If Xft is independent of the X server then breaking it out of the
> XFree distribution makes a lot of sense to me. It would really help
> adoption if it wasn't "Linux only" in effect, as it is right now.

XFree86 isn't "Linux only" by any stretch.  It's rapidly becoming the 
defacto standard X implementation across even commercial Unix varients.
It is tested on HPUX, Solaris and Tru64 on a regular basis.  Not to 
mention that some of the core team are rather devote BSD users.  There's a 
reason I'm publishing code and standards through XFree86 instead of X.org.

Requiring standard XFree86 libraries from your commercial vendors is a 
good thing -- it will make them ship a more reasonable set of libraries 
and make them integrate Xft/Fontconfig support into their releases.  It
would be nice if we could bludgeon them into supporting Render as well; 
that will happen faster if they find all of their core applications using 
only client-side text.

Xft and Fontconfig will remain based out of the XFree86 CVS repository, but
I can tag those sub-trees for finer-grain releases while they're in rapid
development. They're a part of XFree86, but will have sub-releases within
the major XFree86 releases until they've stabilized enough.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        Compaq Cambridge Research Lab