Re: XFree86 modularization

On Fri, 2003-05-09 at 02:13, Torrey T. Lyons wrote:
> >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.

Or simply, that you would have bugged the FreeType people again
about your patch and when FreeType-2.1.4 was released it would
have been in, and until then, people building in your configuration
would have needed a small patch.

One of the great advantages of modularization is that if you have
a fix for one part, people don't have to wait until the next release
of the entire system to take advantage of it.

Regards, 
                                           Owen