[ft-devel] FT2 and LSB

[Camp, TracyX E]

I'm working on an effort to include the full 'font stack' in the LSB
(Linux Standards Base see: http://www.freestandards.org/).

FreeType is obviously an important component of the de-facto 'font
stack' (along with Pango, fontconfig, Xft and XRender) on linux based
systems.  Since LSB release 3.1, LSB has included fontconfig and Pango.
For the upcoming LSB 3.2 release we would like to include freetype, Xft
and XRender (XRender is complete).

So a few questions:

1) comments concerns, about putting FreeType's ABI into LSB?

2) Are there areas of the FreeType API that would be best left out?

3) Are there any upcoming ABI breakage concerns?

How LSB works is that it generates an ABI standard from a released
version of whatever library interface, the standard does not necissarily
include everything from the API and we really try to obtain 'upstream
package' guidance on this when possible.  This ABI remains in effect for
distributions certifying to the particular version of LSB in a forward
compatible manner for a number of years.  Which means if the ABI where
to change at some point in the future, the older ABI would still need to
be supported, or the distribution might be forced to maintain a older
version of the library.  However this does not preclude new APIs or
non-ABI breaking changes to the library or even minor semantic changes
(changing a const qualifier for instance).

In case you are wonder, in a practical sense the LSB ABI is enforced by
creating a stub-library that is used at LSB application linking time and
becomes part of the LSB SDK.  At run-time the application then uses the
real library as supplied by the LSB certified linux distribution.

Thanks,

Tracy Camp