Re: XFree86 modularization

>On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 09:25:39PM -0700, Torrey T. Lyons wrote:
>>  Here's a counter example: In recent history this would have caused
>>  great difficulties on Darwin/Mac OS X with Freetype. Freetype is
>>  largely only installed on Mac OS X as part of XFree86. Although
>>  Freetype supports Mac OS X, the Freetype team has no committers with
>>  a Mac OS X box. Until a few days ago you could not even build
>>  standard Freetype on Mac OS X using gcc but had to use a proprietary
>>  compiler.
>
>That doesn't make a lot of sense.  Fixing fontconfig doesn't get easier
>just because it's in a different tree.  And if there's a small delay
>in getting fontconfig working on $PLATFORM you can just tell people
>they'll have to get a patch from somewhere in the meanwhile.

This assumes that Freetype's priorities and release schedule are in 
sync with XFree86's. In this case it took 3 months for the relevant 
patch to make it into Freetype's CVS repository after being 
submitted. Had XFree86 not had its own copy of Freetype, XFree86 
4.3.0 would still not be released or (more likely) it would have been 
released with a substantial portion of its font features missing on 
Mac OS X.

Of course, this is just a specific example of problems from relying 
on external dependencies. If you have external dependencies, you are 
beholden to them with regards to which $PLATFORM's you can support 
and when bug fixes get integrated into your releases.

--Torrey