[HarfBuzz] Loading Graphite dynamically

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi Martin,

For the curious, this is the PR:

  https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz/pull/107

This basically uses dlopen to open libgraphite2.

I need to understand better what you are trying to address with this.  "A
number of people have asked" does not quite justify it.  Why do people care?

Years ago I thought about doing this, specially since with all the
integrations (FreeType, glib, gobject, icu, graphite2, more to come later),
dynamic loading sounds very attractive.  But decided not to pursue that as it
adds unnecessary complexity.  We just removed support for dynamic modules from
Pango and I'm so glad we did...  I don't want to add those back to HarfBuzz
unless we absolutely have to.

So, what are you trying to fix?


Thanks,
behdad

On 15-05-18 05:50 AM, Martin Hosken wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> A number of people have asked me for a mechanism by which graphite may be dynamically loaded only when a Graphite font is used. I've struggled with the notion of this, but I think I understand it now. I hope that this can help everyone to have what they want for minimal cost.
> 
> I've submitted a pull request on github for a patch that does the above.
> 
> This patch adds dynamic loading of graphite support for graphite fonts in harfbuzz. The three way configure option is now: --with-graphite2=no means no graphite support. --with-graphite2=yes means to build and link against an existing graphite library. --with-graphite2=auto means to build independently of any graphite library but to attempt to dynamically load graphite when a graphite font is encountered.
> 
> This patch has been built and tested on linux only at the moment.
> 
> Yours,
> Martin
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