Re: PangoXft and PangoFT2 patch from hell

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

Alex Larsson <alexl redhat com> writes:

> Here is a patch that adds some generic font aliasing support to Pango. It 
> also has code for the Xft backend to support font-aliases from the Xft 
> config files. It also contains a rewrite of the pangoft2 backend to use 
> the same config file format as the Xft backend so that you will always get 
> the same fonts in Xft and FT2. The PangoFT2 internal API is also 
> simplified because it doesn't have to do fontsets.
> 
> The minixft.tar.gz tarball must be unpacked in $SRC/pango/mini-xft, and 
> contains a copy of Xft without X dependencies.

I don't see the benefits of this approach and don't like the idea of 
wrapping Pango closely around Xft. I also don't see how the Xft config
files are better than the FT2 alias files we have now. Because of this 
I fear that MiniXft adds (unneeded?) overhead and won't help to make
GTK+-FB or GTK+-DirectFB a lightweight library for embedded devices.
But then I guess you have good reasons for making this change. It would 
probably help if you could explain them further. 

Apart from that, I don't see any problems for The GIMP's new text tool
related to this change. There hasn't been much work put into it yet 
and I wouldn't even object if I had to rewrite it from scratch.


Salut, Sven