On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 1:37 AM, Jochen Eisinger <
joc...@chromium.org> wrote:
> We bundled harfbuzz, because the system version on the linux distro we used
> internally wasn't recent enough.
Since we switched blink to harfbuzz for shaping on all platforms we've
had to make a number of changes that require both a blink and a
harfbuzz change. Recent work on the coretext shaper and work last year
on the windows implementation to unblock the switch to harfbuzz on mac
and windows respectively demonstrates this pretty clearly. If we had
to depend on the system version of harfbuzz on those platforms the
switch to harfbuzz would have been problematic at best.
From what I can tell the only reason we use the system version at all
is because pango started pulling in harfbuzz and, at the time, the
version provided by pango was sufficient to support chrome at the
time.
> With a recent enough distro, it should be
> possible to use the system version.
It is for the current version of chrome. We need a newer version of it
for some text improvements we're working on. Despite the fact that the
never version being in third_party and is being used for official
builds we cannot use it as linux distributions bundle a much older
version. On my (current and supported) ubuntu system the version of
harfbuzz is almost a year old.
Depending on packages that are that out of date really isn't practical
and effectively means that we cannot make any improvements to text
shaping or text shaping performance without waiting for a full release
cycle of every single linux distribution we support.
> In fact, on ChromeOS, where we have the system under control, we want to use
> the system version instead of the bundled version, also for official builds.
That is perfectly fine as long as there is a way to update it.
What would it entail to have all linux builds go down the
official-build path and _never_ use the system version of harfbuzz?