Re: XR11R6.7 and X.org release

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu> wrote:
> While the news is a bit old, but it's still great.  Just to add
> that the new X distribution, called "xorg" is hosted at
> freedesktop.org, and already in Debian, Red Hat (Fedora), and
> Mandrake development versions.

It was news to me :-)  I knew there were rumors and various
maneuvers but I didn't pay too much attention to it (I'm unsure
to why all of this happened, but now that it did - I don't care
much :-)

> > - Xterm support for Bidi+shaping (hopefully using the new release of
> > fribidi) (need the URL for the patches if you know them)
> 
> Unfortunately the big problem here is that many people (me
> included partially) believe that bidi does not belong to the
> terminal.  A very strong reason for that is that not all
> languages can be eventually implemented in terminal (perhaps
> Indic languages included).  BTW, the next big step is that there

I'm not of that opinion, if Bidi/Shaping were ever added then they
ought to be added and/or attempted as toggle-able (ie. off by default)
features until maturity.  mlterm has proven that this can be done and
done well.

> is almost no standard for that.  Right now there are three
> efforts for bidi terminal:  MLTerm, BiCon, and PuTTY; and I
> believe each of them behaves differently, due to basically
> different layers they apply bidi.

This I agree with fully - we most definitely need a standard and
a spec to spell things out (wasn't there something started by
the old Xfree86 people or I am dreaming).  I'm just not sure who
is willing to go document all those things (I for one don't have
the proper knowledge to do it), but it very much is needed experiments
aside.  Maybe as we dive into PuTTY more we'll try to cover our
tracks and document 'em a bit.

> > - Xfonts should have a complete set of Arabic letters in their fonts
> > (nadim, I think you are the one to give us specifics on this matter)
> 
> The authority for many X fonts has been Markus Kuhn, that has

And which camp has Mr. Kuhn ended-up in :-) ?  Last I remember was
we were having heated discussions with him and others about the
upper limit on where fonts are being cut-off and someone noted that
they have a new/improved way to do things and that we should see
those Form-B glyphs properly included soon by default.  I have _no_
idea what has become of that -- sounds to me like we need to step-up
and reignite the topic.

> > These are the only two I can think of, please do think about more and
> > add them to this thread. Once we are happy, we will find a liason
> > between us and X.org to make sure the next major release of X.prg X
> > server has these features.

Anmar, do please provide us some URLs and some mailing-lists of interest
so we can start various conversations with the people there (I'm not
sure how many new/old faces there will be), but in all they need to know
about our Arabic issues from the get-go.

This is kinda like the 'emacs' issue which we never seem to have closed
and/or gotten a full and complete solution for (anyone know its status ?).

BTW: thanks for bring-up this topic.

Salam.

 - Nadim


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