freetype hack committed

[Mike A. Harris]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Egbert Eich wrote:

> > Perhaps we should add defines to pick the particular vendor OS 
> > release, and set the defaults based on the combination?
> > 
> > 
>
>Right. I would prefer to have this either in host.def or in a vendor
>specific *def file, though.

That's a good idea.


>However this does not answer my other question and it looks like 
>nobody has ever looked into this. The Xserver module (and maybe
>the other freetype libs) do require a symbol not exported to
>the external ABI thru a header file.
>Has anyone tried if this works better on a later freetype version?

If the X server, or any other software is using internal symbols 
from freetype, then sooner or later, we will end up with broken 
software which is incompatible with official freetype.  The 
internal functions and symbols of any library should not ever be 
used by anything other than the library itself - hence the 
definition of them being "internal".

There are far too many libraries out there that export their 
internal APIs, and end up with other apps using them, and then 
breaking every time the internal bits change.

I feel very strongly against using internal freetype APIs or 
other internal APIs, and would like to see all distributed 
libraries eventually hide their internal symbols either by 
declaring static, or using attribute((__hidden__)) and the like.



-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat