Re: Say goodbye to core X fonts

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 09:41, Arnaud Charlet wrote:
> > I don't see why Xft2 is much worse than the other dependencies of
> > GTK+. The minimum requirements of GTK+-2.2 on a legacy system are:
> 
> It *is* worse, before it makes it harder to e.g. relocate files (e.g.
> configuration files), ...

There is only one config file for those 5 libraries - fonts.conf, 
which can be relocated using the FONTCONFIG_PATH environment
variable. 

> > This just adds
> > 
> >  expat/FreeType/fontconfig/libXrender/Xft
> 
> which is a real pain. Plus the fact that on systems that do not have Gtk 2,
> installing all of this and loading most of these shared libs in memory when
> you are using only a single app is a real waste of memory.

If you do some performance analysis of what the PangoX backend 
is doing and how much memory it takes to do it, you might feel a lot
better about that. :-)

> > And in fact, even with 2.2, you'd be really advised to install
> > expant/FreeType/fontconfig, since many GTK+-2.0 apps (like the
> > GIMP) require the FT2 backend explicitely.
> 
> I am talking about distributing our own Gtk based applications, which we
> control completely.

While that may be the case, I'd really like to have a way of 
making an install of GTK+ on classic Unix workstations that is 
feature complete and can be shared between multiple applications.

Perhaps the right model here is the Java model of a 'SDK' and 
'Runtime Environment', which people seem to deal with pretty
well.

- we provide instructions and/or a script to compile the 
  GTK+ SDK.

- We (or you) optionally provide precompiled binaries of the
  GKT+ SDK and/or RE for various common platforms.

> > I don't think a "standalone" binary of a GTK+ has been reasonable
> > since 2.0 came out. While with --with-include-* it is *possible*
> 
> That's unfortunately close to be true. However, we managed to have a
> configuration with an executable, plus the gtk dlls, and nothing else,
> which is pretty good and relatively easy to handle.
> 
> > to make a totally statically linked copy of a GTK+, it takes
> > an expert and is 200% harder than simply compiling GTK+ and
> > all its dependencies.
> 
> That's not such an issue as long as there *some* way to make it work, since we
> have our experts and they know how to handle these. Now adding Xft makes the
> 200% becomes 500%, and that's what worries me.

I think your are overestimating here. fonts.conf is really a very
simple issue here compared to dealing with the GTK+ and Pango
modules.

> > Plus, a "standalone" GTK+ app binary is likely to violate the LGPL.
> 
> Not if you are still distributing shared libraries.
> 
> Anyway this is irrelevant to the discussion, since our applications
> are full GPL apps, so linking statically is still an option for us.

It may be irrelevant to your *particular* situation, but it is
extremely relevant to your *general* situation, which is:
 
 I have a commercial application using gtk2 that I want
 to install on my customer's old Unix workstations.

I'd rather try to address the general situation rather than the
particular situation.

> > Maybe we need to come up with some standard way of installing
> > the 4 GTK+ libraries and 10 dependency libraries in a "legacy" system
> > in a self-contained way.
> > 
> > E.g., you run your program as:
> > 
> >  /opt/gtk2.2/bin/gtkwrap my-binary
> > 
> > And /opt/gtk2.2/bin/gtkwrap sets all the necessary environment variables
> > to point 'my-binary' at /opt/gtk2.2.
> 
> That's be useful. We do have some scripts and a few local changees to pango/gtk
> to make this easier. I was planning to submit these changes, but got stopped
> because one of these changes concers the pango X back end which is no longer
> maintained... Anyway, I'll submit my other changes (e.g. remove the requirement
> of a gtk.immodules file) via bugzilla.
> 
> > A lot of linux systems aren't going to have Xft2, yes, if that's
> > what you mean by "broken".
> 
> No, by broken I meant a non functioning (e.g. early Xft1) version.

All the more reason to require Xft2...

Regards,
                                             Owen