External library

External library

[Jason Morganson]

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Hello all,

I was wondering what the group thinks about the use of external libraries in
GRUB. Is is acceptable to add this kind of dependency? Would it be alright
to say... add a configure option to compile in support for the Freetype
library? If so what is the proper way that you would like this to be done,
are conditional code blocks enough isolation of the outside code? Also, is
it possible to do initialization in the GRUB_MOD_INIT macro or is there a
better place to do this? I look forward to helping out in any way that I
can. If you could give me a little direction so that I implement in the
manner that you want it done it would be appreciated. Thank you for your
time.

Regards,
Jason Morganson

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Re: External library

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Tuesday 13 February 2007 23:38, Jason Morganson wrote:
> I was wondering what the group thinks about the use of external libraries
> in GRUB. Is is acceptable to add this kind of dependency?

If the dependency is reasonable, and if no license/copyright problem exists, 
yes.

> Would it be 
> alright to say... add a configure option to compile in support for the
> Freetype library?

First I would like to know why you are interested in using FreeType in GRUB.

> If so what is the proper way that you would like this to 
> be done, are conditional code blocks enough isolation of the outside code?
> Also, is it possible to do initialization in the GRUB_MOD_INIT macro or is
> there a better place to do this?

That depends. Say, if you load a module, but not really use it, then it is 
better to initialize the module later, for example, when a function in the 
library is used at the first time. If you load and use it all the time, then 
there is no reason to delay the initialization. This is not so specific to 
GRUB.

Thanks,
Okuji

Re: External library

[Vesa Jääskeläinen]

Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 February 2007 23:38, Jason Morganson wrote:
>> I was wondering what the group thinks about the use of external libraries
>> in GRUB. Is is acceptable to add this kind of dependency?
> 
> If the dependency is reasonable, and if no license/copyright problem exists, 
> yes.

I think directly linking the library might not be a good idea, but
stripping it down to only support most important things and adapt font
rendering code.

FreeType is distributed in both GPL and FreeType licenses.
http://freetype.sourceforge.net/license.html

>> Would it be 
>> alright to say... add a configure option to compile in support for the
>> Freetype library?
> 
> First I would like to know why you are interested in using FreeType in GRUB.

Actually I might be the curlpit for that suggestion ;) See my other
partly reposted message.

Basicly freetype library gives us a support for using vector fonts and
thus we can scale fonts and they still look pretty on larger screens. Of
course one can write that from scratch but here we have a library that
could be used on the task.