Re: PuTTY details

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004, Nadim Shaikli wrote:

> --- Musab Al-Rawi <musab_rawi at hotmail dot com> wrote:
> > main ideas :
> >
> > 1. disabling Windows from shaping and messing up the letters.
> > 2. getting the bidi and shaping into putty(as specified later in the log).
>
> Behdad (there is a question for you below :-)

Hi there,

I read the log completely and found it too late that I've missed
a good meeting.

> To add a bit more content to what is listed above (for those that didn't
> go through the entire log) the following was agreed upon,
>
>  1. It was decided that windows' API and abilities to do Bidi and
>     Shaping should not be utilized (since PuTTY is moving to various
>     other platforms and creating such a dependency is very short-sighted)
>
>  2. It was decided that Arabeyes will generate a patch (in a week or so)
>     to disable the current shaping that is happening
>
>  3. It was decided that the PuTTY team (Simon, et al) are to work on an
>     outline on what needs to be done in terms of adding Bidi and Shaping
>     (ie. which functions need to change, which structures modified, etc)
>
>  4. It was decided that once outline is in hand and patch is complete
>     that we'd touch base again (if need be and if warranted).

This is generally the right way to do it, but there are things to
learn in the last parts.  So you can go your way in the mean
time.

> Behdad, now for your question :-)  PuTTY utilizes the MIT license
>
>   http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/licence.html
>
> and so the question came up with regard to whether FriBidi (being LGPL)
> could be integrated without any license issues or headaches.  In other
> words, would PuTTY's license be intact if FriBidi was added ?  I know
> virtually nil about licenses and decided to ask.


FriBidi is LGPLed, which means you can easily link to it without
any headache.  That's what xterm already does!  Yes, xterm has
bidi extensions that uses FriBidi.  So you cannot include code
from FriBidi in PuTTY, and I'm happy you can't :).  You link to
it.  There is some work on a DLL version of FriBidi already in
CVS.  If that does not do the job, have a look on AbiWord
sources.  I would be happy to distribute the fribidi-0.10.4.dll
on the official site.

> Salam (and Regards :-)
>
>  - Nadim

Good luck and keep us posted,
behdad