RE: [ft-devel] Status of 2.2

[Matthias Clasen]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 10:44 +0200, Turner, David wrote:
> > I'm investigating whether I should update Rawhide to freetype 2.1.10.
> > A number of questions come up:
> >  - Do you have any idea how far out 2.2 still is ?
> >
> 
> Not precisely, mainly because I haven't had the time to provide
> patches for all major libraries. At the moment, both Pango and
> LibXft have received and integrated patches. However, I believe
> that QT and SDL_ttf, at the very least, still need updates.
> 
> 
> There is something I'd like to ask to anyone having access to the
> *complete* sources of a distribution, because it will help us prioritize
> the patches. I'm thinking about Owen Tayloy, Frédéric Crozat and
> possibly others:
> 
>   - would it be possible to perform a massive grep over all sources
>     of all packages you maintain to check for 'illegal' uses of the
>     FT2 internals ?
> 
>     the way to do that is simply to perform a fgrep for the
>     following:
> 
>        FT_INTERNAL_
>        FT_CACHE_INTERNAL_
> 
>     I'd really like to have a report telling me which package still
>     use theses. Unfortunately, I don't have the time and disk space
>     to download all sources repositories of various distros.
> 
> this would be hugely useful for me. Especially if you also include
> previous releases of your distribution, not only the bleeding edge
> one.
> 
> 2.2 won't be out until we're certain that no problem will arise on
> too many desktops, which means having a set of patches readily available
> for several versions of Pango, LibXft, etc...
> 
> Experience taught us that even if we put big warnings in the README or
> source code, people tend to ignore them anyway :-)
> 
> 
> >  - Will 2.2 be libfreetype.so.7 ?
> >
> Yep,
> 
> >  - Do you still plan to break source compat by doing const 
> >    correctness changes ?
> >
> Werner thinks it's a good thing. And I myself have no opinion on
> the topic.
> 
> >  - Does FT_OPTIMIZE_MEMORY still break apps ? I know that Pango
> >    has been patched, but I hear xfs segfaults with the memory
> >    optimizations. Are there patches beyond the (applied) pango 
> >    patches to fix breakage due to this ?
> > 
> FT_OPTIMIZE_MEMORY only breaks libraries (not apps) that use internal
> FT2 functions when they shouldn't. That's because the optimizations
> changed many internal things in the font engine, not its public API.
> 
> The problem with the xfs segfault is fixed if you use the current CVS
> sources, or use a patch that was posted here:
> 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2005-08/msg00014.html
> 
> technically, this is an X.org bug that only happens when the X Server
> uses an external freetype shared library (instead of having its own
> copy within the server)
> 

Thanks for the information, David. I'll look into finding offending
packages in Fedora/RHEL.


Matthias