Motion: include AGG freetype (2.4 version) in MapServer

[Daniel Morissette]

For what it's worth I'm +0 on this at this point... I may change my mind 
once I start going through the hell of trying to build AGG support on 
various platforms, but I have not been able to get to that yet and still 
have some hope that someone will come up with a way to solve this issue 
in a way that avoids having to include this code in the source tree.

Daniel

Howard Butler wrote:
> On Aug 13, 2007, at 1:02 PM, Sean Gillies wrote:
> 
>> Howard Butler wrote:
>>> All,
>>> I've come around to thinking that the only way we can limit the  
>>> configuration/building issues we are about to inflict on our users  
>>> with AGG is to include the freetype stuff in MapServer's source.  It  
>>> seems many of the distros are treating the AGG freetype  
>>> inconsistently.  Just building AGG because of its spartan build 
>>> setup  is quite a chore.  Hacking makefiles, compile targets, and 
>>> link lines  to get what is needed is just too much.
>>> I propose we take the GDAL "thirdparty" approach and put the AGG  
>>> freetype stuff in ./thirdparty/agg and update MapServer's configure/ 
>>> make system to always use that.  We have done something similar in  
>>> the past with GD, right?  If so, this approach would not be  
>>> unprecedented.
>>> Howard
>>
>> I disagree. One of the tenets of Open Source is that people 
>> collaborate on software and fork only as a last resort. Why not 
>> contribute improvements to AntiGrain? I thought I read that the author 
>> was going to grant a GPL exception explicitly to MapServer.
>>
> 
> Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but my reasoning for this 
> motion is as follows:
> 
>  - AGG will never be mainlining the freetype stuff because it doesn't 
> want it as a default dependency
>  - The AGG author doesn't want to use autoconf/libtool, so patches that 
> we might submit to make building things with options more easy are 
> likely to rejected.
>  - AGG's license split (and ambiguity with respect to MapServer 
> specifically) and MapServer's usage where GPL isn't appropriate means 
> we'll have a not insignificant number of people continuing to use AGG 
> 2.4, where patches like this, even if accepted, would not apply to them.
>  - It is a lesser evil (in terms of work required and badwill generated) 
> to just maintain a small copy of the freetype stuff than to fork *all* 
> of AGG at 2.4.  Some other group may yet do this (I have no direct 
> knowledge).  It almost happened a number of times with libgd before 
> Boutell let PHP pick it up.
> 
> Howard


-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/