Re: [PATCH] Xft patch reloaded, #3

ms> You'll note that Hrvoje chose this particular way of putting ms> things. In fact, the analogy holds for Xft. The sentence ms> would be "Xft breaks Mule." Right. Put that way, it's obviously unacceptable, unless the breakers are willing to go as far as Ben does to make it right. I see no evidence of such willingness. Let's not argue Ben's sense of timing, he said he was going to make Mule work correctly on Windows, and he has done it. Didn't take a weatherman to figure out which way that gale was blowing. But this situation smells to me much more like syntax table properties and integrating GTK+, both mistakes. The GTK+ analogy is especially troubling. Lots of user enthusiasm, but except for right after the release of 21.4, when Bill P was fairly active, the top patchers to GTK have been Ben (refactoring) and James Lewis-Moss, Debian maintainer of xemacs packages (configuration nits). Nothing has been done on fundamental problems, especially on porting to GTK+ 2.x and dealing with the fact that GTK+/GNOME have completely gone their own way with respect to application configuration. And I'm still seeing lots of GTK+ bitches on c.e.x and xemacs-beta. Wouldn't you be worried in my position? Stephen> Doesn't this bother you at all? Why are you fighting a Stephen> request for some badly needed clean-up as the price of Stephen> getting approval for a feature that will aggravate the Stephen> need for the requested clean-up? ms> I didn't. I fought just about once. I explicitly said that ms> everything you said about this patch is valid. So just tell us what you and/or Eric and Matthias plan to do about those criticisms, or give a design that shows how we can work on the other problems without effectively doing `patch -R < xft-3.diff' and rewriting the Xft support from scratch every time we improve Mule support. It may not be all that hard; Matthias in particular has given some reasons for hope that straightforward solutions are available for on several of the issues. But that hope needs to be supported and the plans made more concrete. ms> I asked you to write up a plan acceptable to you. ms> Are you're effectively saying there is none? No. I'm saying "writing up a plan is not my job, man." Writing up a plan for something like this is most of the hard work, as you well know. That's why you want me to do it, and that's why I want you to do it, right? :-) I'm willing to help, but the responsibility has to be on the people who want to put the patch into the trunk. If you want me to do the planning, you're going to have to wait on my convenience. If somebody else does that work, I'll make time to review plans, improve Mule documentation, review and test code, etc. And that's a reasonably plausible commitment; I've already made several contributions (hey, who was that masked man posting texinfo docs for fontconfig?) to this line of work. I see no comparable credibility in claims from the Xft crowd that they'll support Mule. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.