Re: Say goodbye to core X fonts

[Arnaud Charlet <charlet ACT-Europe FR>]

> 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. :-)

I really hope so. Having real figures would certainly be helpful.
Also, what is the disk size of a expat/FreeType/fontconfig/libXrender/Xft
installation ?

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

Well actually having to install the right JVM is also a pain in the neck,
so we usually avoid any Java based application :-)

But this general goal is certainly a nice one. I am just getting the
impression that all these nice things tend to be simply ignored because of
other issues, and therefore tend to never quite happen.

For the time being, we often simply find that our supported platforms are
simply not considered at all by the Gtk+ maintainers (e.g. Solaris 2.5.1),
or that there are critical blocking bugs that requires patches, and
therefore rebuild of the gtk libraries. Hopefully this will become less
and less of an issue now that Gtk+ 2.x is getting more stable.

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

I can assure you that building

expat/FreeType/fontconfig/libXrender/Xft

on non first class citizen platform can be a real pain (certainly building
the whole Gtk+ 2.2 suite today is already quite a challenge, so any new
dependency add to the difficulty).

> 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.

On the other hand, you should be more willing to help the situation of GPL
software (be it commercial or not) rather than proprietary software.

> > No, by broken I meant a non functioning (e.g. early Xft1) version.
> 
> All the more reason to require Xft2...

Or no Xft at all :-)

Arno