[ft-devel] Regarding the 2.1.10 release

[David Turner]

Hello everyone,

after much tinkering, I've determined that the next release
could badly break a various number of installations, especially
"old" ones. As suspected earlier, the problem comes from various 
releases of Pango, LibXft and FontConfig which happen to do
weird things with FT2's internals. It also seems that
undefining FT_OPTIMIZE_MEMORY doesn't always solve problems
(at least on RedHat 7.3 where it was tested).

My intention is to follow this plan:

- make a preliminary release candidate with FT_OPTIMIZE_MEMORY
  undefined, to minimize potential problems.

- produce patches for Pango, LibXft and fontconfig to
  definitively get rid of their rogue header inclusions,
  and make them depend mandatorily on FT2 releases >= 2.1.10.

  the patches will be posted to the FreeType web site and
  sent to the respective library maintainers. Chances are
  that these will require small modifications to FT2 itself
  to support the "features" implemented.

- after completion of the patches, the real release will be
  made with FT_OPTIMIZE_MEMORY defined. Its configure script
  should try to detect unpatched versions of the offending
  libraries and produce HUGE WARNINGS when compiling FT2.

- moreover, this new release will not install the FreeType
  internal header files in <prefix>/include/freetype2/internal

- instead, it will install 'dummy' headers, which purpose
  will be to produce #errors at compilation time, in order
  to inform developers that they should upgrade the libraries
  they're trying to link with FT2... (again, trying to be
  descriptive)

I'd like to have your comments on this important topic.

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)