Server side text layout (was Re: [forum] some XFree86 5.0 questions...)

[Havoc Pennington]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 02:46:52PM -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > We've just finished spending two years moving millions of lines of
> > code *that Sun has just shipped* over to fontconfig/Xft/Pango. Do we
> > want to do that again?
> 
> Actually, while Sun's GNOME 2.0 release does use pango, I don't beleive
> we've shipped a single line of code yet that uses fontconfig/Xft.  It's
> certainly not in our GNOME 2.0 release.  Whether or not converting again
> makes sense depends on whether there are enough benefits to make it
> worthwile, just as that had to be decided when converting to pango
> originally.

Fair point, but do keep in mind that GNOME 2.2 has fontconfig as a
hard requirement already, and GTK+ 2.4 will follow suit.

Sun's GNOME 2.0 is a GNOME 2.0/2.2 hybrid (just like Red Hat Linux 8),
our hybrid has already jumped to the fontconfig stuff from 2.2, yours
has not, apologies.

> The Xft bridge provides backwards compatibility for those who think the cost
> of converting old code outweighs the benefits of converting code directly to
> STSF, but that there is value in using STSF.

Xft bridge provides back compat for the font rendering layer, not for
the text layout layer or font configuration layer. The font rendering
layer is the most trivial and least important of the layers.

The porting cost I'm complaining about is that of changing the
configuration and layout layers.

Havoc