Hi Shachar,
I am reading your interview and a few words jumped out at me, mostly "BiDi", "shaping" and "unicode" - very vague I know, but if I understand correctly Pango is a library with advanced support for shaping and laying out all kinds of different scripts. Only stopper I can think of would be that it uses UTF-8 not UTF-16.
Have you looked at this, or am I talking smack?
thanks -mike
Mike Hearn wrote:
Hi Shachar,
I am reading your interview and a few words jumped out at me, mostly "BiDi", "shaping" and "unicode" - very vague I know, but if I understand correctly Pango is a library with advanced support for shaping and laying out all kinds of different scripts. Only stopper I can think of would be that it uses UTF-8 not UTF-16.
Pango uses fribidi for it's bidi. As fribidi doesn't do shaping, I'm not sure where pango's shaping comes from. It may be an add-on.
In any case, I'm hoping that if/when fribidi starts to support UTF-16, pango will follow. Last time I looked at it, we were too far off from needing what pango had to offer. Getting a bidi edit control (sigh) is much higher on my todo (for which I have no time :-( )
Have you looked at this, or am I talking smack?
The really sad thing here is that ICU really has everything we need. It's just that it's too simple for people to compile wine without it, that is the problem.
thanks -mike
Shachar
On Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:00:37 +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
Pango uses fribidi for it's bidi. As fribidi doesn't do shaping, I'm not sure where pango's shaping comes from. It may be an add-on.
Pango shapers are plugin modules written specifically for Pango, iirc.
The really sad thing here is that ICU really has everything we need. It's just that it's too simple for people to compile wine without it, that is the problem.
OK. Well, that can be solved by WineHQ providing high quality binary packages that work anywhere. When I get around to this (maybe in a few months) I'll let you know and you can kick me if I get ICU integration wrong :)
thanks -mike
Mike Hearn wrote:
OK. Well, that can be solved by WineHQ providing high quality binary packages that work anywhere. When I get around to this (maybe in a few months) I'll let you know and you can kick me if I get ICU integration wrong :)
thanks -mike
No, that won't solve the problem. For a package to be included in Debian, for example, it needs to be reconstructible by doing "apt-get source wine; apt-get build-dep wine", and then simply CDing into the proper directory and running the build script. If there is no half-way modern ICU version in Debian, Ove can't really build wine with BiDi. Maybe we can get our supplied packages to be BiDi enabled, but so long as we use ICU, and ICU has this horrible linking policy, we can't really get it wide-spread. Since I want it widespread, fribidi is where I'm headed.
Shachar
On Sat, 2004-07-03 at 11:47 +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
No, that won't solve the problem. For a package to be included in Debian, for example, it needs to be reconstructible by doing "apt-get source wine; apt-get build-dep wine"
To be frank I think that's Debians problem, or to more accurate the problem of those who insist on using apt-get for everything. If WineHQ provides high quality tested binaries with ICU included, they can use that if they want BiDi.
There will *always* be random distros that have packaging policy that conflicts with Wine, I don't think we should let that dictate our choice of libraries. If we switch to FriBiDi maybe that fixes the Debian case but breaks the Mandrake case, or whatever.
thanks -mike
Mike Hearn wrote:
To be frank I think that's Debians problem, or to more accurate the problem of those who insist on using apt-get for everything. If WineHQ provides high quality tested binaries with ICU included, they can use that if they want BiDi.
There will *always* be random distros that have packaging policy that conflicts with Wine, I don't think we should let that dictate our choice of libraries. If we switch to FriBiDi maybe that fixes the Debian case but breaks the Mandrake case, or whatever.
thanks -mike
Just to sum up the IRC discussion with Mike: 1. I use ICU because it's the best we have at the moment. That doesn't revoke my right to hate it. Until I have an alternative (or someone else steps forward to do BiDi on Wine), that's what we are using. 2. Eat the strawberries. 3. Never tell amusing stories around geeks. They will either guess the punchline or find logic errors in the story.
Full IRC logs are available upon request :-)
Shachar
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Mike Hearn -
Shachar Shemesh