Adding new libraries to the repository

[Shachar Shemesh]

First, I want to mention that I was contacted by a group who has been 
working on the same project for some time now, and we may simply merge 
our efforts (they are, quite obviously, much further ahead than me). 
Assuming that doesn't work out, however....

Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:

>On March 24, 2002 09:51 am, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>
>>A. What are my chances of getting a patch of this magnitude incorporated
>>into the tree. The library is not particularily big, but includes a set
>>of unicode translation files that are automatically generated from the
>>unicode standard. It seems that WINE holds similar files itself, for
>>similar purposes. I have not yet checked whether they conflict, and if
>>they do, whether this conflict is resolvable.
>>
>
>Can you perhaps test in configure if fribidi is available and if so, make use 
>of it, if not, do not compile in BiDi support? This way you don't have to 
>include the entire fribidi stuff in Wine, and the patch would not be as big:)
>
That sounds like the most reasonable suggestion. This way we can 
automatically benefit from new versions of libfribidi, and the porting 
effort will be minimal.

I'll be frank and say that my main concern is that standard packagers 
(RedHat) will not include it if it will be configured this way. I guess, 
however, that the meaning of "Free software" is to let the packager have 
the freedom to ship the inferior product.

More concerning is the fact that, as Alexandre said, fribidi is UTF-32, 
requiring unnecessary conversions (all Arabic and Hebrew chars fit into 
UTF-16 without surrogates).

>
>However, this brings another questions: should we separate the Unicode stuff 
>out of Wine, could it be usable by the fribidi stuff as well? Maybe Mozilla, 
>and other projects? It's not that big, but it seems everybody and their 
>brother have their own copy of the stuff.
>
Fribidi does have, to some degree, a unicode implementation. I don't 
feel aquinted enough in the surrounding details to give an informative 
opinion, however.

>(this, of course, provided you license your code under X11 as 
>well).
>
Hard for me to answer at this stage, but I am not inclined to.

                Shachar