Re: PuTTY Bidi - final points

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Simon Tatham wrote:
> Unicode combining characters is a _very_ complicated piece of work,
> I'm afraid. It basically requires the whole of the terminal code to
> be redesigned:
>
[snip snip]
>
> I doubt that anyone except me has the depth of knowledge of the
> terminal.c code to make a really good job of this change, and I'm
> afraid it isn't currently very high up my priority list, so we may
> have hit a serious impasse here.

Fair enough - its something we'll need at some point but at
this stage we can (and have to :-) live without it as there
are more pressing issues.
 
> > I think ICU's licence is probably OK , but you will need to get an OK
> > from Simon for that (and whether we're happy to embed that in PuTTY).
> > The licence looks like MIT:
> > 
> > http://oss.software.ibm.com/cvs/icu/~checkout~/icu/license.html
> 
> That's a very strange licence! The wording is MIT-like, but the
> `no promotion' clause at the end looks more like BSD.
> 
> I'm unconvinced about this, I'm afraid. That promotion clause looks
> horribly like a GPL incompatibility to me, and one reason I like the
> MIT licence is that it's fully GPL-compatible.

We have 3 options here then,

 1. Contact ICU's authors and FSF for clarification on ICU's
    license (I doubt ICU/IBM was shooting for anything that is
    NOT fully GPL-compatible - I also thought ICU is being used
    in GPL projects, no ?).  This might actually get resolved
    very fast with recent attention to the license changes on
    Xfree and Apache and would play well with regard to the
    SCO/IBM lawsuits, etc.  Simon ?

 2. Find other Bidi code alternatives (do any others exist) ?

 3. Write our own (which seems rather silly at this stage, but...)

Simon, how does the patch look so far (ie. with regard to adding
PuTTY's own shaping, etc) ?

How should we proceed ?  As noted, we are ready to get Bidi's
inclusion done and resolved so we can forge ahead with other
issues (waiting around in limbo is simply painful).  We just
need to know what to use.

Regards,

 - Nadim


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