Re: Debian Installer?

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

I tried to show that minibidi is not a real bidi implementation
by mentioning a few things it misses.  Just a short list out of
top of my head:

* Takes \Theta(N^2) time for an string of length N.
* Does not implement rule L3 at all.
* Is not portable: uses wchar_t.
* Just works for BMP (plane 0) (in fact dumps core for chars
  beyond BMP).
* Has known bugs handling explicit marks.
* Char type lookup is slow as hell.
* Is not tested AT ALL.
* Updating to later Unicode versions is not any easy.
* Has quite a bad design:  Table in header file.
* Does not expose all functionality of the bidi algorithm.
* Has no build system.  Is not a library.
* Does not follow the standard with respect to line-breaking,
  shaping, and bidi interaction.


And note that this last one is really hard to implement, and is
why shaping is not in FriBidi yet...  As I already have said lots
of times:  Bidi/Shaping is not done line by line...

And I can express how important these points are, and how much
evil is it to duplicate code in different projects.  Right now we
have only 6 bidi implementations used widely (FriBidi, KDE,
Mozilla, OO.o, Java, ICU), and we've got enough headache with
them, now go on and send this ugly hack all over different
projects...  So, in short, is not conforming to standard in any
level.

behdad


On Fri, 21 May 2004, Nadim Shaikli wrote:

> I'm not sure I understand (I might have missed some mails or something
> since I don't remember this topic so sorry), but what is wrong with
> minibidi and is this concern in relation to the shaping inclusion ?
> I'm simply trying to understand the rationale noted or is it with
> regard to inclusion vs. linking and being an external library, etc.
>
> I believe it was mentioned as a simple pre-cooked Bidi+Shaping solution
> that will get the job done.
>
> Salam.
>
>  - Nadim

--behdad
  behdad.org