Re: bloatware

On Sunday 30 March 2003 19:25, David Dawes wrote:
|  On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 10:45:39AM +0400, Vadim Plessky wrote:
|  >On Sunday 30 March 2003 04:09, Havoc Pennington wrote:
|  >|  On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 11:49:13PM +0300, Vadim Plessky wrote:
|  >|  > Ok, what about 60MB of "font sources" (PCF, BDF fonts) in XFree86
|  >|  > CVS and resulting 20MB of "installable fonts" in RPMs?
|  >|  > Isn't it bloatware?
|  >|
|  >|  If you don't want to use those fonts, just delete them. This is not
|  >|  that hard. ;-)
|  >
|  >That's not so easy.
|  >Many apps use 'fixed' font name as default fontback.
|
|  That's trivial for you to fix.

Again, I think that fix should go to right place.
Applications requesting 'fixed' font should be fixed first - at least to such 
level that those apps if I don't have fixed font installed.
Not correct behavior is one problem, but things are much worser if your 
application crashes!

|
|  >Those apps (incl. Window Managers) would just crash if that font is
|  > missing.
|  >
|  >Besides, deleting 60Mb of fonts from sources would reduce size of all
|  > Linux distributions - RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.
|  >I am speaing about both RPMs and SRPMs combined.
|
|  You don't want them => nobody can have them?  That's the problem
|  with those of you that want to strip things down.  You want it
|  stripped down to your particular requirements, and screw everyone

That's not fair.  I am not going to "screw everyone else"

|  else.  XFree86 has a wide target audience, certainly much wider
|  than the vocal minority present here.  Lots of stuff is *optional*,

Ok, what's your understanding of XFree86 audience?
If you think that you have better knowledge of Xfree86 audience (even not 
being subscribed to /active on/ KDE-Core or GNOME-devel lists) - please stand 
up and make your point.
So far, argumentation has been provided that XFree86 development process is 
somewhat closed (which is not *serious* problem, in case Xfree86 meets user 
expectations), developing slowly, and XFree86 misses crucial features (and 
this already affects me and other users).

|  so if you don't want it, don't build it.  If you find things that
|  aren't optional that you think should be, submit a patch that fixes
|  it.  Whinging about it will make exactly zero difference.  The

AFAIK, one person (Keith Packard) is submitting more than patches - he is 
developing a whole XFree86 modules (extensions).
And what came out of this?  He was kicked out of XFree86 Core.

Taking your wording, was Keith also "whinging about it"?!.

The real patch to XFree86 would be:
* converting PCF and BDF fonts to TTF with Embedded Bitmaps
* getting rid of legacy backends ('type1', etc.), as FreeType supports even 
those BDF and PCD fonts nowdays.
* bundling top-quality outline fonts with XFree86, so that there is no good 
reason to use bitmap fonts anymore.

I was focusing (for the last 1.5 years) on point 3.
There were some issues with PS Hinter in FreeType, which are more-less fixed.
Now you can have nice working XFree86-based system *without* bitmap fonts, or 
stealing Microsoft  WebFonts from your Windows system.

|  fonts have been optional for years.  Not only that, there's a
|  reasonable amount of control over what subset of the fonts actually
|  gets installed.
|
|  If the distros want that space saving, there's nothing stopping
|  them from deleting them from their version.  The XFree86 release

What about limited resources (time, people, money, etc.)?

I am curious here to hear Mike Harris's opinion here - wether he is willing to 
split fonts (whenhe does packaging for RedHat) or even delete those legacy 
fonts from distribution.

|  tarballs have stuff like the fonts and spec docs broken out already,
|  so you don't even need to download them if you don't want it.
|
|  It seems to me that you're looking for something to complain about.
|  You're welcome to off course, but it might be more productive to
|  put your efforts into the real problems.

Ah, really?..  What a nice attitude!
Saying that fonts in Xfree86 are broken *by design* and *by packaging*, is 
just "looking for something to complain about"?
And proposing ways to fix this is not "productive effort"?..

|
|  David

-- 
Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
SVG Icons * BlueSphere Icons 0.3.0 released
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