Add BiDi infrastructure

Alexandre Julliard julliard at winehq.com
Fri Aug 16 17:56:31 CDT 2002


Shachar Shemesh <wine-devel at sun.consumer.org.il> writes:

> I have the creeping suspicion you don't realize just how much of a
> shortcut using fribidi is. All of the stuff we have there already that
> says "exteremely preliminary" is going to be replaced with
> approximately four to five lines of code.

Knowing Microsoft, I have the creeping suspicion that it's not going
to be that easy. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong, but there's
only one way to do that, and it's to show us the code. Not the
configure checks, the actual code.

> At the moment, I think it is particularily counter-useful to have
> mandatory BiDi support in Wine, as this means (among mere applying the
> BiDi algorithm) translating each string printed to UTF-32 and back
> (unless we can say for sure that no BiDi is going to be required -
> havn't found a really good algorithm for that yet, but I'm working on
> it). Not having the proper library on your machine is a pretty good
> way of indicating that BiDi is not interesting to you (and is, more or
> less, the way MS tackled the exact same dillema).

Well, obviously the number one reason for having that code inside Wine
is that we can make it work with UTF-16 and skip the conversion step.
And if there's really a need to disable BiDi for performance reasons,
a config option is a much better way than trying to guess depending on
the existence of an external library.

The only interesting question is whether using the external library
allows us to do everything we need with reasonable performance, and
whether it makes things easier. The only way to answer that is to try
it one way or the other and see what you come up with.

If you think using the external library is the way to go, fine, do it
that way and submit a patch. Then we can start really discussing
it. And don't worry about configure checks or packaging issues; we'll
deal with that later on.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.com



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