McEs, A Hacker Life: If you see Keith Packard, say hello

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

If you see Keith Packard, say hello

Tell him to give me commit access to fontconfig. He stopped responding to my multiple pings and other messages a while ago.

The last fontconfig release happened over a year ago. I've been hacking on fontconfig and reviewing and committing patches submitted by others since August, and my tree has accumulated 190 commits so far, and touches about 7000 lines of code.

My tree fixes more than half of the bugs open in upstream bugzilla. It also includes many many performance improvements. Consumes less memory. Has a FcFontSort() call four times faster. And adds many new features as well as support for many new languages.

It also adds features needed for automatic font installation using PackageKit. This feature is included in Fedora 11, which means my tree is shipped in F11. Other distros however are waiting for a tarball without "behdad" in the version tag before updating.

Thanks,
behdad

Labels: fontconfig

¶ 5:08 PM

Comments:

The fontconfig home page:

http://fontconfig.org/wiki/

Contains links to Warhammer online gold farmers in the Recent Changes section... eg. No activity there.

Why not just fork fontconfig if you don't hear from him in a while

# posted by

Max : June 10, 2009 6:47 PM

Argh, Debian's fontconfig has Keith as maintainer :(

# posted by

Anonymous : June 10, 2009 10:30 PM

Just out of curiosity, did you ever end up fixing the having-to-restart-programs-to-see-new-fonts limitation while you were at it?

# posted by

Ll : June 11, 2009 12:51 AM

You seem to have something stuck on your chin. I guess the guy taking the photo wasn't kind enough to tell you.

# posted by

Anonymous : June 11, 2009 3:06 AM

I sat across from the guy at Jones Farm, in the Open Source Technology Center for three months.

You should have told me earlier.

# posted by

Unknown : June 11, 2009 3:32 AM

Ll,

That didn't need fontconfig changes. I fixed that in GNOME last year. Have been working since Fedora 10.

Cheers,
behdad

# posted by

behdad : June 11, 2009 6:21 AM

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2009-May/thread.html#45585

He appears on the xorg mailing list in may, but not in june.

Still it may be worth emailing that list about the pending patches.

# posted by

stuaxo : June 11, 2009 6:26 AM

Missing in Action?

Last I heard Keith was going with Chuck Norris - beating the sun on the beach unconscious.

# posted by

shevy : June 11, 2009 7:04 AM

I've given you fontconfig access now, after corning keithp (again) about it. He acked that he probably won't actually get around to reviewing the patches, because of the time required to catch up. It's unfortunate that there's nobody else to review the patches (fontconfig certainly seems like it needs it), and that's what he was blocking on. But if there are only two of you, and he doesn't have the time, then you should at least be able to push imo.

# posted by

Anonymous : June 11, 2009 1:54 PM

Thanks to Eric Anholt and Keith Packard, I'm the new fontconfig maintainer now. Have made three releases already, and more coming. Thanks everyone.

# posted by

behdad : September 04, 2009 3:35 PM

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