Re: Bidi-less Applications Patching Policy

[Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

 --- Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org> wrote: > 
> 2. miniBidi must quickly comply/conform to the entire
>    standard

'Must'? Hopefully. We have an excellent record on the 'quickly' thing.
Please give an estimate of time (either core or miniBiDi maintainer).

> 3. miniBidi is to remain simple, educational and bleeding-edge.

miniBiDI is to remain simple and compliant at the same time? or one of these
conditions can be somewhat sacrificed?

> Because this could lead to bottle-necks, a deadline would be given to
> have the external project make a final decision. If during this time,
> they would still not consider FriBiDi, miniBiDi would automatically be
> used.
> 

.. assuming that we can choose for them if they passed the deadline.
You mean really people like CUPS will hesitate to choose for some time and then
we will decide for them?

> One of the reasons this policy is important to be stated explicitly is
> so it is clear that miniBiDi is _NOT_ meant to compete with FriBiDi. We
> have seen in the past how projects may have their own special
> requirements (licensing conflicts, coding conflicts, etc.) and a more
> flexibly licensed implementation was/is the only solution.

Let this be clear. If a project wishes to use miniBiDi (due to license issues
or some other reasons) this will get us in a number of problems:
- They use miniBiDi
- miniBiDi is either conforming or not. If it is not, we will have a large
number of bugs related, which will keep software not compliant for ages to
come. This is a no-no.
- If miniBiDi is compliant, fine and good. Notice that this means we will have
to maintain it: squash any bugs that appear, and tracking the Unicode standard
which will probably change (slowly) from time to time.

In other words, I don't like this decision, as it is bug-prone. Either we
support FriBiDi and forget about miniBiDi altogether, or we are prepared to
give full status, including maintaining and updating, to miniBiDi.

> 
> P.S. [off-topic] It is also worth noting that FriBiDi's lack of shaping still
> remains to be a serious short-coming of the library.
> 

I would also add my support to this last statement. FriBiDi's two problems now
are its license and lack of shaping. Though the issue of licensing does not
bother me and I have a whole set of arguments for L/GPL, the lack of shaping
remains an issue.
(I know, Behdad, use BiCon's..)

Salam,
Muhammad Alkarouri


	
	
		
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