Stop-ship 0.9 problem

[Dmitry Timoshkov]

"Dimi Paun" <dimi at lattica.com> wrote:

> Sorry Dmitry, but to me it seems ridiculous to argue against a fairly
> well known fact. The AA TrueType fonts has been an ongoing problem for
> _years_ with no solution in sight, whereas our Wine 0.9 release should
> be available in a matter of weeks. Given the short time frame, it's not
> an option to change they way the world works to conform to our liking.
> 
> It's just not gonna happen. At most we can hope for is to piss a lot of
> people off and look like we don't have a sense of reality.

It looks like FreeType has some bug fixes in that area, at least I've found
this one in the changelog:

LATEST CHANGES BETWEEN 2.1.10 and 2.1.9
    - Another  serious  bug  in  handling  TrueType hints  caused many
      distortions.  It has been introduced in version 2.1.8, and it is
      highly recommended to upgrade.

There are some other fixes in hinting handling including autohinter bug fixes,
so it's worth to upgrade to the latest/CVS FreeType and see if it helps Wine
as well.

> > Have you asked your Linux vendor to enable/license truetype hinter in
> > FreeType? If not yet, it's time to do so.
> 
> This has been brought up many times (at least on RH related lists).
> It is not an option, and for good reasons. Let's just deal with it,
> and run like bandits :)

Could you enlighten me by listing those "good reasons" here? I suspect
that the real "problem" with licensing the patented technologies in Linux
is a general stance of GPL and Linux crowd regarding software patents
making them "non-free".

-- 
Dmitry.