Re: [putty]Re: PuTTY details

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

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Simon Tatham wrote:

> Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> I'm not convinced that a DLL solution is the right thing for PuTTY.
> One of PuTTY's major good points is its ease of installation -
> _everything_ is in a single self-contained binary. If people start
> having to get hold of a DLL from another website in order to make it
> work, I think that would be beginning to drift away from the self-
> contained philosophy.

Well, I'm not the only author of FriBidi and it many people have
contributed to the thing.  We discussed about loosening the
license once and we decided it would go with LGPL.  If someone
needs the functionality, she would not mind downloading one more
package.  I don't talk about Windows users, but on Linux, AbiWord
already uses FriBidi, so must probably Arab people have it
installed.

> It would be _totally_ unacceptable if non-Arabic-speaking users
> still needed to have the fribidi DLL before PuTTY would work; at the
> very least the functionality should degrade gracefully in the
> absence of the library.

That's PuTTY's design afterall.  Nothing to do with FriBidi or
any other library.  Yes, it should ignore it silently.

> More importantly, a DLL solution is tying the functionality to
> Windows again - if fribidi is going to be used, then it should be
> usable on all platforms.

FriBidi is designed and work on POSIX systems.  There has been a
port for Windows system as I mentioned.  It uses libtool so you
can compile it under cygwin, OS X, BSD, Solaris, Linux, ...

> Cheers,
> Simon

Cheers,
behdad