Re: [ft-devel] Regarding the 2.1.10 release

[Lars Knoll]

On Saturday 26 March 2005 15:09, Owen Taylor wrote:
> I've always been quite willing to accept that if FreeType changes
> break Pango, I'll fix Pango. But I'm a little worried about timing
> here ... removing the internal headers completely is going
> to require pretty major changes to the opentype code ...  so I'd
> like to have some time to try those changes in Pango HEAD before
> I need to do a Pango-1.8.x release with the changes.
>
> Do you have a planned timescale for when the final 2.1.10 is
> planned? If we can do the pango/opentype changes to make it
> use the raw tables in the next few weeks, and still have a few
> more weeks to test that in HEAD, then that probably will work
> fine.
>
> Another possiblity would be to up the major version of FreeType to
> allow people to keep using Pango compiled against the old version.
> I don't think this is a good  idea - you can get bad problems if an
> application is linked  against libfreetype.so.6 but a library it depends
> upon (fontconfig, Pango, whatever) is linked against libfreetype.so.7.
>
> So, basically, changing the major version of FreeType requires
> immediately fixing uses of the internal headers and rebuilding all
> apps on the system. The main difference from not changing the
> major number is that innocent applications that don't use
> FreeType internals also have to be rebuilt.
>
> In terms of the opentype code ... I'd certainly like to see it
> being maintained someplace shared rather than copied around. My
> thoughts last summer are outlined in:
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2004-08/msg00036.html
>
> Basically to redo the otlayout/ module in freetype CVS starting
> from the current Pango code. But I never really got everybody
> "signed off on" that plan, and other development priorities arose.
> But I think it's still a good idea. Behdad Esfahbod (cc'ed) is
> starting to look at doing some major work on the opentype code
> in Pango, so maybe he'd be able to help out moving to an
> independent code base.

If we could for example move it to freedesktop.org this would be a great 
thing. As you said, this got lost again after last summers discussion. I 
would still like to see this happen and am willing to spend some time on it.

> (I think rewriting to use  Werner's validator should be done
> separately.)

I agree.

Regards,
Lars

> [ Note, I'm away from my email until 3/31 ]
[Same for me...]