Re: [Patch] libzvt totally broken for fontset, hence CJK.

[Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com> writes:
> > 
> > That would be because there's a lot of applications which do things Wrong
> > and don't react to locale change. Besides, Unix locale model is not
> > capable of supporting several locales in one application, so the only way
> > to achieve that effect is to cheat with fonts.
> 
> I understand that it's more convenient to just change the font, but
> apps can't support that while also supporting CJK correctly. So our
> CJK patch breaks this trick. I got lots of flames in Red Hat bugzilla
> when the patch went in.

I know it breaks it. All CJK patches tend to break that trick. The
problem is that until recently most applications didn't know how to
handle Latin-x (where x is not 1) locales. There are different strategies
one can use to make them work. My favourite example is a program which
changes font metrics in Netscape browser (by patching the binary) in order
to make it print something which is not Latin 1.

But for the display purposes, substituting fonts is usually enough.
For years, that has been the only way (not just more convenient way).
However, in order to set up things like that, one has to know a lot about
the inner workings of X11 and applications. So the situation we have is
that somebody comes up with a trick to make certain application display
or print properly for "non-supported" locales. It gets propagated through
Usenet, web and other means. A large number of users start using that
trick. They don't know if it's right or wrong and what the consequences
are. It's just something which makes certain application usable for them.

So they use it for years. When something breaks that trick(s), they think
that the application become broken. I can't blame them. Even for Latin 1
locales, X is not the friendliest environment. For other locales one has
to be a Unix and X11 hacker to make the desktop even remotely usable.

-- 
 .-.   .-.    I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had
(_  \ /  _)   about you.
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     |        dave arsdigita com