Re: [ft-devel] FreeType Amalgamation

[Werner LEMBERG]

>>...there are several macros that would not work if all sources are
>>concatenated.  ...An example is GET_PIC() macro defined by
>>src/xxx/yyypic.h. and src/xxx/ttpic.h
>
> Isn't this easily fixed by renaming one of the #define and changing
> the appropriate source files?

We will do so.

>>I neither have time nor energy to change that.  It's there since ten
>>years, and it works essentially everywhere.  Note that there are
>>other packages which do similar things, for example `boost'.
>
> Sure, but it gets in the way of an amalgamation.  It can be worked
> around though.  However, what is the purpose?  Is there ever a
> situation where FT_GLYPH_H is defined to something other than what
> exists in the header file?

The user has the flexibility to do so.  With a specially crafted
ftheader.h file, you can e.g. put all header files into one directory,
both at build time and after installation.

>>How shall this work?  There are dozens of platforms, and you want to
>>hard-code them all in a configuration header file?
>
> Yes, that is the hope.  This is the approach taken by boost.

Maybe this works for C++ since it is a newer, stricter standard, but
for C I fear you'll find a platform where this fails.

> The amalgamation should work with all platforms that FreeType
> currently supports, of course!

This, I believe, is an illusion.  You'll certainly find a compiler
which fails to compile without proper autoconf configuration.  Maybe
it's better to restrict amalgamation on a subset of supported
platforms.

> Well nice suggestion but this doesn't get us much.  I prefer a
> requirement of passing -l flags to the amalgamation tool to inform
> it of all the directories to search for includes, because this way
> someone who wants to produce an amalgamation does not have to
> re-shuffle the FreeType source tree after they check it out.

Is your amalgamation tool freely available source code which I can
build by myself on GNU/Linux?

Having a `make amalgamation' target within FreeType is the right route
to go IMHO.  Whether this uses your tool or another one (possibly
hand-crafted) is not so important.

>>There were good reasons for it which you might look up in the
>>archives.
>
> How do I look this up?

The list archive is here:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/

Here David has announced the change:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2000-12/msg00025.html

The corresponding commit in the git repository is

  8fba32d2d6f284bfd49ed6c0557880e0bb692f49


    Werner