Re: gEDA-user: PCB Gtk port

[Igor Izyumin <igor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mario Klebsch wrote:

> I must admit, that I do not notice any difference. In fact, I don't 
> care. I was able to read text, when characters were displayed using 
> 5x7 pixels, I still am able to read my text on the X11 display. Don't 
> get me wrong, I do not mind, if this is possible, but I do not want to 
> be forced to do so.
>
> And IMHO thinge are implemented badly wrong, Font rendering has to be 
> done by the X server, not the application. This is the way X11 works. 
> If we give up the X11 philosophy part by part, what reasons are there 
> to keep X11 at all? X11 does have lots of disatvantages, I hope noone 
> forces us to give up its advantages.
X11 is a badly antiquated system.  It was developed a long time ago, and 
changed very little since then.  Many of the things that a windowing 
system was supposed to do in the 1980s are not needed today.  Many of 
the things that are expected of a windowing system today were not needed 
in the 80s.  I think it's quite obvious that a modern OS needs to have 
antialiased TrueType fonts, but regular X11 does not support them.  What 
do you suggest should have been done?

> Noone argues, that the application should be written in a way, that it 
> is impossible to use all this modern, bandwith and cpu time consuming 
> stuff (in german, I would call it Plüsch), but it should be possilbe 
> to leave if off, and this decision should be left to the person 
> compiling the program.

That's always nice whenever it's easy to do, but sometimes these things 
are awfully difficult.  It's basically a question of where to draw the 
line with regard to portability.  Make something depend on lots of 
libraries, and it won't run on some computers.  Make it portable and 
self-contained, and it becomes large, slow, and difficult to maintain.