Re: Opal, NSFont, NSFontDescription and AppKit

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hey,

Eric Wasylishen wrote:
> Hey Ivan,
>
> It would be easier to proceed if we could agree on making cairo a 
> required dependency of GNUstep-gui. Any thoughts on that now?
While I know you prefer that, I still vote against this. I like our 
back-end "independence" and modularity. Making cairo required would mean 
abolishing all our backends and have only cairo. Cairo improved a lot, 
but it is not as versatile as the sum of the other backends is. (for 
example, Sebastian reported that on some OpenBSD targets cairo doesn't 
work).
win32, within its limitation, is still very smooth on windows as xlib 
is. The only backend that is not as useful as it used to be is art. 
Cairo could be probably made support the user-friendly .nfont packages. 
However, I just recently used the art backend on a modern computer and I 
was amazed at how smooth and well it works.

It is probably a matter of convenience vs. versatilty.

Riccardo