From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Tue Feb 26 2002 - 21:34:49 GMT
On Tue, 2002-02-26 at 16:20, sam th wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-02-26 at 14:12, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> > At 6:58 PM +0000 2/26/02, Andrew Dunbar wrote:
>
> > >Also I'm wondering if this decision should be taken
> > >seperately from deciding whether we should use Pango
> > >at some point.
> >
> > Pango, as cool as it is, requires a LOT of Glib/GNOME to
> > function and that's problematic on our full platform list.
> >
>
> Actually, Pango just requires GLib, which should work on all of our
> supported platforms. It definitiely works on Win32, *nix, and is being
> ported to BeOS. (www.gtk.org/beos) And, I remember Havoc Pennington (a
> GTK+ maintainer) saying that he would like it to be as portable as
> AbiWord.
>
Pango uses Glib2, which has other dependencies and idiosyncracies. wv
and NOT Abi uses glib1.2
Glib2.0 uses:
* threads (win32, posix, solaris, NSPR) including mutexes and
conditionals
* the gobject system
* libiconv
* a simple xml parser (i believe)
And a bunch of other stuff that we either already provide or have
workarounds for. Plus it has lots of baggage that we don't need (string
tokenizer class, hashtables, ...) or don't want. Ideally GLib2.0 could
be ported to QNX, BeOS, MacOS, ... with a minimum of work, but it'll
probably be non-trivial for at least one of those platforms.
Add that to the fact that I'm not convinced that Pango is the best
solution for us post 1.0, and you get my resounding "no" opinion on
Glib2.0 stuff, at least for now.
Freetype is very simple to use, highly portable, and solves a very
centralized and small (yet very important) problem of ours. Using Pango
will undoubtedly require a MAJOR overhaul of BOTH our and Pango's
internals and is something that hasn't been duly researched into for our
purposes. IMO, using the word "Pango" on this list at this point is just
another buzzword.
Dom
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