Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering

[Joshua Boyd <jdboyd@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 12:40:31PM -0400, Stuart Brorson wrote:

> Before you go down that path, please let me remind you that you're
> introducing more dependencies into gEDA/gaf which will come back
> and bite you on the ****.
> 
> I'm not fond of cairo since it's a fast-moving dependency and is not
> present on many standard distros.  Also, it's slooooooow on lots of
> platforms.  However, as a developer experiment, I figure it's harmless
> as long as we also support the same features in GDK, and can turn
> cairo off during configure time.  (And it remains off for now.)

Uhm, doesn't Cairo end up dragging in Freetype anyway (except for when
building cairo natively on Windows and OSX)?
 
> As for Freetype, I *strongly* urge you to avoid it since it's also not
> present on many (most) Linux distros, and it will also drag in
> fontconfig and ${DEITY} knows what other libs.  I've had to deal with
> installing Freetype, and they use their own non-standard build system
> to build and install the library.  For me, getting their build system
> integrated into a larger install was a total nightmare  [1].  Pity the
> poor, ignorant user who will be required to install all the garbage
> necessary to make Freetype work on his system.

I don't recally having to install fontconfig or any other libraries when
I put freetype onto an embedded system I created.  Freetype states:
  Apart from a standard ANSI C library, FreeType 2 doesn't have any 
  external dependencies and can be compiled and installed on its own on
  any kind of system.

Actually, they do require GNU make, so they lie a bit there.

I especially don't recall anything of the sort about fontconfig.  And
fontconfig can't be found on the embedded system (I just checked with a
find command).x

They say that all you have to do to get around their autoconfig-ish type
thing is to supply your own config.mk file.  Provided that the contents
of the needed .mk file don't change with every release from them, then
maintaining this file should be fairly simple.

> IMO, using yet another external library is not worth the inevitable
> support headache just to get some pretty fonts.

> [1]   The build system works just fine on a stock Linux box if you do
> a hand install, but becomes a royal PITA if you try to do anything
> more than that.

Using their instructions for installation, it also works just fine on
Solaris using SunStudio, and it works just fine on Irix using MipsPro.
Their support is pretty wide, which is more than I can say for a lot of
software. 


_______________________________________________
geda-user mailing list
geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user