Craig Bradney wrote: [] > What is the progress of the later versions of FT? > And also fontconfig? I think with 1.3.x we will leave behind the X11 > dependency as we will more than likely move to using fontconfig for font > discovery (fontconfig support is already in 1.3.0cvs).
There is an eternal discussion about a basic problem with Fink and other similar enterprises which are not complete OS distributions but only add-ons to an already rather complete OS, namely how far we want to stay with versions provided by the system or replace them by newer versions. I am normally in favor of using as much as possible the OS-provided versions and use our own more recent versions only if absolutely necessary. In the case of freetype2, we actually at one moment decided to hide the Fink freetype so that programs would by default link against the version from Apple's X11. We even wanted to eliminate the Fink freetype2 package. Scribus was one of the reasons that forced us to keep our own freetype2 package. Another reason is that newer versions of X11 have newer versions of freetype, the X11 from x.org has freetype-2.1.8 if I am not mistaken. And unfortunately, the freetype developers haven't heard about the virtues of backward compatibility. They keep changing the API in arbitrary ways, by removing or adding underscores inside variable names, or by making the standard entry header <freetype/freetype.h> fail with an error. Therefore updating to freetype-2.1.9 for example, is not completely obvious. The Fink packages are ready, but it turns out that quite a few other packages break with this. Mozilla, for one, does not build against freetype above 2.1.7, xpdf is another example, and there are probably many others (no problem with scribus, though). For fontconfig there is probably a similar story (I haven't had to fight with this yet, so I don't really know). In any case, there is a fontconfig-1.0.1 in Apple's X11, a version 2.2.2 in x.org's X11, and Fink has a static fontconfig library of version 2.2.0 (needed for gimp). Actually, static linking might be a possible solution for some of these problems. -- Martin
