[PATCH] (Draft2) Make X11 server-side fonts and Mule suck less.

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an tri? l? de m? na Samhain, scr?obh stephen at xemacs.org: 

 > Aidan Kehoe writes:
 > 
 >  > There?s less round-tripping in this implementation than in the
 >  > previous one. Previously, matches would be tried against the
 >  > XListFonts results with wildly inappropriate (to this Mule charset)
 >  > things in the X11 charset registry; now, the registry is modified
 >  > before calling XListFonts, so we never move through a list of
 >  > fallbacks that can never have a successful regex match for the Mule
 >  > charset in question.
 > 
 > No, there's less testing of the registry spec against actual fonts;
 > but as I understand the code, XListFonts should only be called once.

That?s not the case. If there isn?t a match--as will be the case if a
Japanese font is looked up and the X11 platform code has initialised the
default face?s specifier to -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
--the specifier instantiation code tries the face?s fallback patterns,
calling XListFonts for each one. In the X11 code as it stands, for a charset
that isn?t available at all in the X server, this means 128 times, often
with patterns like:

      "-*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1",
      "-*-fixed-medium-r-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1",
      "-*-courier-*-r-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1",
      "-*-fixed-*-r-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1",


      "-*-*-medium-r-*--*-gb2312.1980-*",
      "-*-fixed-medium-r-*--*-cns11643*-*",

      "-*-fixed-medium-r-*--*-big5*-*,"
      "-*-fixed-medium-r-*--*-sisheng_cwnn-0",

which are a _total_ waste of time for Ethiopic or the IPA, especially since
that no font will support those scripts is _entirely expected._

 >  >  > [...] Well, yes, but is it such a good idea that we should make
 >  >  > work for others? That's one of my pet peeves with GNU.
 >  > 
 >  > IMO incorporating that change would make their code base more
 >  > understandable and would be a positive change, just as it would be in
 >  > ours. I don?t think providing a prompt to do useful work is specious
 >  > or thoughtless.
 > 
 > Er, who says they'll think it's useful?

Maybe my judgement is really bad; in which case I shouldn?t be committing to
XEmacs. But if my judgement is reasonable, and I think the work useful,
then that?s the closest I can come to predicting that they will too, in the
absence of unknown or undocumented philosophical differences with them.

-- 
Santa Maradona, priez pour moi!