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Torry,
> Sender: [email protected]
> From: Torrey Lyons <[email protected]>
> 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. I do not mean to pick on the Freetype team--they do a great
> job. Freetype has just had a different emphasis with regards to which
> platforms they support. However, whenever XFree86 depends on an
> external library that may not have the same level of support for all
> the platforms XFree86 supports, you need to have XFree86 maintain a
> local copy of the library.
>
This cuts both ways: the version of Freetype shipped with XFree86 4.3 was
badly buggy on rendering, and the fact that it was built and installed by
default meant that when I was worrying about the rendering of Vera
during its beta test, I had a broken version installed without being aware
of it (as part of having installed XFree86 4.3). The ensuing mess
took me a couple days to sort out, discovering that the bad rendering
on my screen was due to this buggy version distributed by XFree86.
In short: there is a difference between including software as part of
an overall distribution to benefit some platforms, and building and
installing it by default on platforms where that library is maintained well.
(both Debian and RedHat Linux shipped versions did not suffer from the Freetype
bugs present in the Freetype version shipped by XFree86). Modularization does
not imply that software not be present and available to some who need
it.
- Jim
----
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company
[email protected]