On Wed, 24 Apr 2019 21:47:39 +0200 Hiltjo Posthuma <hil...@codemadness.org> wrote:
Dear Hiltjo, > I'm not in favor of this. I think this should be fixed upstream. > > Now that there has been a release of dwm and dmenu with the > workaround it should be removed I think. > > There is no nice workaround except making the code more ugly. Should > every project using fontconfig add this stupid workaround? I don't > think so. One of the things that flow from the UNIX philosophy as I > see it is solving things at the appropriate layer (or try to). > > There have also been reports of FC_COLOR patch "not working", because > distros (in particular Debian stable, Slackware etc) using 4+ year > old backported fontconfig versions. FC_COLOR is not known there. > #define FC_COLOR "color" is a workaround which does not fix anything > #except make it compile. It will still > crash there. > > The whole concept of colored fonts is anti-suckless and retarded in > general. I agree with your sentiment, but still wanted to open the discussion of this possibility here. We can't fix the issues upstream, but it's a real concern that Xft will never be fixed in this regard. After all, the best course will be to have a real suckless font rendering library like the one you started working on a while ago. Regarding st, I also must note that the handholding my patch does might be a bit too much relative to other suckless projects. I sometimes have the impression that the big library makers like FreeType, HarfBuzz, Pango and so forth want to make you believe that it's an impossible feat, overflowing you with their set of features, tweaks, performance hacks and LCD-rendering-tricks. You've shown that it is possible with much less code, so maybe we should be the ones, as suckless, to lead the way. Maybe you could make a short write-up on hackers@ of your results. From what I remember, you tweaked on it for quite a while, and it could save other collaborators from spending a lot of time you did on some issues. The use of stone-age old libraries in Debian stable, Slackware, Fedora and others is a sin against human kind and in my opinion one reason why the Linux desktop never really took off until a few years ago when other, more bleeding edge distros, entered the playing field. I _never_ _ever_ saw an example were using old, backported versions was a benefit over new code. Granted, one should not use the bleeding edge on production systems, but that's what major and minor versioning is for. Debian stable discarded minor versions just the same and it takes a lot of man-hours to preserve this bloody museum of software over there that could be spent much better on other things! With best regards Laslo -- Laslo Hunhold <d...@frign.de>
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