Re: GnomeFont state of affairs

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On 16 Jun 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Lauris Kaplinski <lauris@kaplinski.com> writes: 
> > Now my own reasoning for separate Gnome font API is following:
> > Gnome has some specific needs, which are not covered by low-level
> > API -
> > such as font installing, font sharing in workgroups, font matching between
> > different output devices & so on.
> 
> Can you please try to have only a glib/pango dependency? I see no
> reason you need a GNOME dependency here.
> 
> If it has a GNOME dependency, people will have to reimplement a
> generally-useful solution. Most Linux distributions won't be able to
> adopt a GNOME-specific solution for installing fonts, for example.
> 
> It's OK to have a library on top that actually requires GNOME, for
> stuff like dialogs, but installing fonts etc. should be below the GTK
> layer.

Given that GNOME provides a lot of the infrastructure that would be useful
in building this system (for example, it would want to tie in with
gnome-print, leverage gnome-vfs for font sharing, and utilize gnome-libs
miscellanea) it's really stupid to reimplement these solutions in the font
library or do other massive shuffling just to avoid a GNOME dependency.

"Most Linux distributions" will have no problems using a tool that
installs fonts, whether or not it happens to use GNOME. It's not like a
KDE program will suddenly be unable to render Type1 fonts just because
they were installed by a utility that uses (horrors!) gnome-libs.

You may be on an anti-GNOME crusade or whatever, but it seems that
building on what already exists is the fastest way to a good solution.
This is, after all, the GNOME project.

-- Elliot
The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8 meters per second per second.