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The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF

Posted by Hemos on from the the-war-goes-on dept.

NoSun writes "Sun's latest project is to create a font library for XFree86, named Stsf, that would replace Fontconfig and Xft2. But the big question is: Does the world need yet another X font library that would create more incompatibility and fragmentation? Well known Gnome and GTK+ developers are against this (yet another) X font library which just re-invents the wheel one more time with the result of slowing down KDE and Gnome in the desktop race. "

3 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Hello, logic? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    - If Sun's project is vastly inferior, no one will use it and it won't cause "fragmentation".

    - If Sun's project is vastly *superior*, then the people who switch to it will enjoy a great implementation. You shouldn't force Sun to collaborate in this case. Mozart's compositions wouldn't be as good if he had been forced to "collaborate" with the inferior composers of his time.

    - It's only if Sun's project is "comparable" to previous projects that it will cause fragmentation.

  2. Re:Mightn't this be a good thing? by be-fan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From all indications, it appears that stsf uses FreeType as a backend renderer. FreeType, in recent versions (2.1.3, 2.1.4) is extremely good. Have you taken a look at it lately?

    --
    A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  3. One already exists of course..... by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Insightful
    One issue I think a lot of posters here are missing is that fontconfig and the rest are already deployed and working, whereas STSF isn't even completely implemented yet.

    That means STSF doesn't have to be just a little bit better, it has to be VASTLY better to justify ripping out a brand new font architecture. Nobody is convinced it is.

    Other people seem to be of the belief that having 2 competing font systems is ok. It's not - this is two competing interfaces, NOT implementations. Well, STSF can apparently emulate Xft, but you don't get any advantages that way, so what's the point?

    So STSF had better be pretty amazing to justify it. Sure, Sun can go and use it if they like, but it'd require major b0rkage of GTK, and those patches would probably not make it back into the trunk, so they'd have basically forked GTK. Not good.