Re: GTK+-2.x planning

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Keith Packard <keithp keithp com> writes: 
> 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.
>

What I'm saying though is that it takes _ages_ for something to
trickle out to all those vendors latest releases (and then for users 
to upgrade to said releases). If you rely on the vendor-installed copy
of something you have to wait at least 2 years for said something to
make its way out, probably longer.

With Linux you don't traditionally have to do that since we have
really short release cycles. Though even with Linux,
separately-available tarballs would let people require Xft versions
immediately instead of with a 9 month lag or so. 
 
> 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.

Even now GTK 2 will be noticeably suboptimal on systems without
Render/Xft, so there will be pressure to ship those.

Havoc