Re: [Devel] Moving the location of "lsb_delta" and "rsb_delta"

[David Turner]

Hi Werner,

Hurray for DSL :-)

Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> >   The old location did BREAK BINARY COMPATIBILITY, which had the
> >   potential to create *serious* trouble on any Linux or BSD
> >   installation upgrading to the CVS sources. [...]
> >
> > PS: Retrospectively, Werner's addition of the "x_ppem" and "y_ppem"
> >    fields to the public FT_Bitmap_Size structure also did break
> >    binary compatibility for those apps that did access the
> >    structures directly.
>
>
> I thought we've come to the conclusion that the next major FreeType
> release (2.2) need not be binary compatible with older versions.  Have
> I misunderstood something?  While I agree that preserving binary
> compatibility is a good thing, sometimes it is hard to improve the
> library since we have to add a lot of work-arounds.
>
> To avoid future problems I ask for clarification, and perhaps an
> outline how to work around.

I think there is a big misunderstanding there. The role of 2.2 was
never to break binary and/or source compatibility for applications.

Its purpose was/is to re-design the internals, especially the
module/driver interfaces to make them simpler. This should only have
an impact on people developing custom font drivers[1]

The only part of the high-level API that could change would be the
custom memory and stream interfaces, but even this doesn't seem to
be really necessary.

Since we already heavily modified the internals (e.g. "services"),
we could probably release 2.2 right now, if the current code was
thought to be stable. Well, I don't know if it is though I'd like
to release 2.1.9 soon, just after the server re-work...

Not to say that the internals won't change anymore, but the
only changes to the high-level API should be additions, hopefully..

More on this later,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)


[1] Yes, there are a few of them (I've developed myself two custom
font drivers for my work :-), though I don't expect normal applications
to depend on this.


>     Werner
>
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