Re: IMPORTANT: proposed removal of non-bidi code

From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue May 07 2002 - 15:00:17 EDT

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    At 06:26 PM 5/7/02 +0200, Christian Biesinger wrote:
    >Paul Rohr wrote:
    >> 1. native, non-bidi ... the well-tested code that everyone uses now
    >> 2. bidi ... some testing, not enough use
    >> 3. Pango-based ... to be written and/or ported as needed
    >[...]
    >> I also am willing to believe that we'll get to the point where #3 is good
    >> enough that we should *also* replace #1. However, I'm stunned to hear
    that
    >> we're already at this point.
    >
    >As I understand it, #2 will replace #1; not #3.

    Why do it then? The whole point of doing #3 is to replace #2, right? For
    many many languages -- indeed for most existing computer users AFAIK -- #1
    Just Works already and *neither* #2 nor #3 is needed. [**]

    I understand that simultaneously maintaining all three variants is a
    headache, but this sounds like we'd be dropping the wrong one now. If we're
    going to have only two variants of the code for a while, wouldn't it make
    more sense to drop #2 and focus our efforts on #1 (needs no work) and #3
    (needs significant work)?

    By switching to #2, don't we expose ourselves to bugs in BiDi-related
    portions of the codebase that *we plan to abandon* (in favor of Pango)?

    I still must be missing something here.

    Paul

    [**] To be clear. I want #3 to move forward. Supporting more languages is
    a very Good Thing. Leveraging other people's expert work to do so is also a
    Good Thing. I'm just completely failing to see why we should abandon #1
    before #3 is further along.

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