The 'xft' USE flag is a global USE flag with the following description: xft - Build with support for XFT font renderer (x11-libs/libXft) This seems innocent enough. Indeed, on app-editors/emacs, enabling this USE flag gives us improved font rendering using Xft (with antialiased fonts and other niceties). Same goes for openmotif. A handful of other packages use this flag but I have not tried them -- I would suspect that enabling it on fltk has similar results to openmotif. However, on net-irc/xchat, this flag has the effect of disabling Pango (for the main text area only) and using Xft directly. Further note that enabling or disabling this flag does not affect "support for XFT font renderer", since Pango supports rendering using Xft. The result is that enabling the 'xft' useflag on xchat disables the internationalization features that would normally be present in the text area (most notably multiple font selection). I hear that it also makes scrolling somewhat faster. I propose that disabling Pango for the main text area should be done with USE="-pango" rather than USE="xft". The default should be to use pango. I have attached a patch which does this.
Created attachment 203542 [details, diff] Replace USE=xft with USE=-pango
Is something holding this up? It seems like a slam dunk.
The problem here is that even with --enable-xft xchat links to x11-libs/pango. So a pango USE flag would be more than confusing here. To be honest I do not really know what to do with this bug. I can see the reporter's point but I don't have any good idea how to implement this in a good way in the ebuild.
The main confusion arises from the fact that _enabling_ the xft useflag _disables_ important features (and the program can render fonts with libXft regardless of how you set the 'xft' useflag, because it uses pango). This use of 'xft' (a global use flag) is not consistent with either its description or its use in other packages. Renaming the flag to just about *anything* else would solve this issue. How about 'xchatfastscroll' instead?
(In reply to comment #3) > The problem here is that even with --enable-xft xchat links to x11-libs/pango. > So a pango USE flag would be more than confusing here. > To be honest I do not really know what to do with this bug. I can see the > reporter's point but I don't have any good idea how to implement this in a good > way in the ebuild. Just get rid of the flag. It's clear that no one really knows why using xft directly is/would be better, so the flag's just confusing people. I don't think renaming it to xchatfastscroll is sensible. That's a worse kludge that what we've got now.
(In reply to comment #5) > Just get rid of the flag. It's clear that no one really knows why using xft > directly is/would be better, so the flag's just confusing people. From what I understand, it can make scrolling the main text area significantly faster because it avoids much of the overhead of pango. It was added in response to bug 231433. This comes at a price: you lose many of the special features of pango. I certainly would never make this tradeoff. > I don't think renaming it to xchatfastscroll is sensible. That's a worse > kludge that what we've got now. It was just a thought: a local use flag would allow a reasonable description of what this flag actually does.
+*xchat-2.8.8-r1 (19 Jan 2011) + + 19 Jan 2011; Lars Wendler <polynomial-c@gentoo.org> -xchat-2.8.8.ebuild, + +xchat-2.8.8-r1.ebuild: + Removed xft USE flag as its effect in xchat was different to the global + meaning of xft USE flag. Thanks to Nick Bowler for reporting this in bug + #284218.
Sorry I was a bit too overhasty. I now stick with a renamed USE flag: + 19 Jan 2011; Lars Wendler <polynomial-c@gentoo.org> xchat-2.8.8-r1.ebuild, + metadata.xml: + Partially reverted my previous commit and simply renamed the xft USE flag to + fastscroll to better reflect its meaning.
