Re: [dev] Re: freetype2/fc pain

From: AR Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2018 09:09:44 -0700

On Sun, 23 Sep 2018 at 04:59, Quentin Rameau <quinq_AT_fifth.space> wrote:
> > The idea behind libsl has to be improved in code and I will work on
> > this. The drw.h API is not strictly enough defined and both dwm and
> > dmenu access certain aspects of drw.h that they shouldn't, which makes
> > it currently impossible to cleanly implement either simple plain X11
> > support or let the Xft/fc abomination survive in one possible
> > direction or to introduce a different implementation like cairo-based.
>
> Maybe drw is not needed at all and could be put back into main code.

This is another option, though there are commonalities between dwm and
dmenu in terms of font drawing, which is why it once was put into a
common place.

It is a good question how much stricter abstraction would harm or
benefit. I'm in the process to determine that.

> > I will reassess if the xlib dependent part in dwm can be separated
> > further as well, to allow a more agnostic WM core.
>
> Hum, this was tried for st, and imo it didn't bring much benefit, only
> a half-separation of code into files, but not totally separated.

Well I gave up on this already. The issue is that any potential
abstraction of X would not be a good interface for other non-X
environments like considering a suckless wayland compositor or
implementing the dwm on top of something else. It is too much
overengineering for no benefit.

> > I know that I did raise the multihead question a couple of times in
> > the past, and mostly the picture I gathered was 50/50 -- one half uses
> > Xinerama setups, the other doesn't. Thus my old idea of arranging the
> > code in a different way might be an answer, which would allow building
> > dwm single-headed (without Screen) and multi-headed (witch Screen
> > derived from Xinerama).
>
> I use Xinerama, but I can live with it being stripped off into the
> patches section.
> Would it really bring much more simplicity?

This rearrangement of the code actually looks promising -- I'm not
talking about putting Xinerama support away as separate patch, but
rather putting it into a separate file and having a simple dwm per
screen (with some extra sugar to allow sending windows across the
screens like before if Xinerama is enabled).

Best regards,
Anselm
Received on Sun Sep 23 2018 - 18:09:44 CEST