Re: Opal, NSFont, NSFontDescription and AppKit

[Ivan Vučica]

Fred:
> Wouldn't it be a lot simple to just disable the compilation of OpalText as 
> Niels suggested?

I suppose it would have been, but I felt more like hacking around with
this. Hopefully, in a few weeks, I'll run into the need to draw text
with Opal for GSoC, and if this isn't cleaned up by then, this
stop-gap measure will do.

Eric:
> Feel free to create a branch (svn copy) of opal and commit your patch there, 
> if you feel it's a hack / not really suitable to commit to trunk. In general 
> it's fine with me if you commit to trunk though. :-)

Okay! I'll look into that on my next hack-sprint. :-)

Eric:
> Currently it's hard to justify working on Opal because nothing uses it

QuartzCore/Core Animation has just started using it. If everything
goes well (fingers crossed!), in a few weeks UIKit will start using it
as well. By the way, I have a non-free game I worked on targeting iOS;
it's my goal to get it running on GNUstep. If I reach that phase, I'll
try to write a simple, free RSS reader using this future UIKit
implementation.

Riccardo:
> While I know you prefer that, I still vote against this. I like our back-end 
> "independence" and modularity.

It's definitely great to have multiple backends. Sometimes, however,
it's sad looking at how easier it is for Apple where they control a
single WindowServer, a single set of frameworks, a single kernel, low
number of drivers...

Price of freedom, I guess. :-)

-- 
Ivan Vučica - ivan@vucica.net