[ft-devel] Enabling the incremental interface by default

[Ralph Giles]

All,

Attached is a patch enabling FT_CONFIG_OPTION_INCREMENTAL in the
default build. I hope Werner will apply it.

The argument for this is as follows:

FreeType has for many years provided an optional
FT_Incremental_Interface to support clients like Ghostscript which
need to be able to supply glyph data through a callback as text is
rendered. This was an optional feature in Ghostscript, but we are now
switching to FreeType as our primary font rasterizer. There will be a
transition period this year, after which we hope to rely entirely on
FreeType and abandon our native rasterizer.

As such, it would be nice if we could link directly against upstream.
That's would be convenient for us, but I think it also makes sense for
the general community. The incremental interface had bit-rotted quite
a bit since it was initially developed. As of today, Ken Sharp and
Werner have it working again without crashes or errors. If this API is
going to be in regular use it makes sense to build it so it gets more
regular attention. Also, Ghostscript is a core component of the
printing infrastructure on most free operating systems, and part of
the Linux Standard Base. The packaging guidelines of most Linux
distributions require linking against shared system libraries for all
dependencies, so the distros will have to ship FreeType with the
interface enabled anyway. Enabling it upstream simplifies this
transition and makes less work for everybody, since we can just depend
on a new release.

Cheers,
 -r

0001-Enable-the-incremental-font-interface-by-default.patch
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0002-Improve-the-comment-describing-the-FT_CONFIG_OPTION_.patch
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