Re: [putty]Re: PuTTY details

[Simon Tatham <anakin at pobox dot com>]

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.

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.

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.

Cheers,
Simon
-- 
Simon Tatham         "My heart bleeds.
<anakin at pobox dot com>    (That's how it works.)"   -- Gareth Taylor