xc/lib/font/FreeType/ in "XORG-RELEASE-1"-branch differs fromXfree86 trunk...

[Keith Packard]

Around 21 o'clock on Mar 14, Roland Mainz wrote:

> Can you please restore the original code ? I guess the current version
> in the "XORG-RELEASE-1"-branch will likely result in a horrible
> disaster.

I don't see a horrible disaster here; I see a performance problem for an
unexpected usage pattern (fonts with embedded bitmaps that aren't used).
I don't think there is any functionality that will be impacted.

And, if we do ship the code, I expect the FreeType API will never be 
fixed, so we'll be stuck in the next release at the same place.

Actually, I was thinking about this -- you want to know when bitmaps are in
use; it seems like that's trivial -- pull a single glyph from the font and
see if you get back an outline or a bitmap.  Assume that the font will 
uniformly return bitmaps or outlines; after all, that's what's being 
assumed in the current code.  That should be essentially as fast as the 
original code without breaking the API.

> The argument that a semi-private API is being used isn't that worse in this
> case since Xfree86 codebase and other applications make use of that API,
> too.

It's not a 'semi-private API' -- the header file needed to decode the 
values here is burried deep inside the FreeType source code and has never 
been installed.  The additions to use this API were added to the FreeType 
backend very late in the XFree86 4.4 release process; too late in fact to 
be evaluated by the FreeType backend maintainer, Juliusz Chroboczek.

Yes, I'm being hard nosed.  If we can't respect other projects APIs, then 
we can hardly be surprised when other projects don't respect ours.

-keith


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 228 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/release-wranglers/attachments/20040314/0ef22e79/attachment.pgp