emacs-snapshot should be compiled with xfont support enabled

[Will Farrington]

Binary package hint: emacs-snapshot

For a long while now, Emacs snapshots have been able to build with antialiasing and xfont support enabled. However, in spite of this, the Ubuntu packages still apparently lack these features - driving me to use older snapshots built for feisty users (as seen here: http://peadrop.com/blog/2007/01/06/pretty-emacs ).

Xfont et al. should be enabled.

[Will Farrington (wcfarrington)]

To apply the requested changes would require adding:

emacs_gtk_confflags += --enable-font-backend
emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft
emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-freetype

to the "Emacs-gtk confflags" section.

[Will Farrington (wcfarrington)]

Accidentally sent that early - should be to the "Emacs-gtk confflags" section of the debian/rules file.

[Michael Olson (mwolson)]

I looked into this today. The main Emacs branch does *not* have these compilation options, so the answer is not to add them. The only way of getting this Xft support is to switch to the unicode-2 branch, which is not going to happen. The current policy for this particular package is to track the main branch only.

I am not opposed to making a separate similarly-named package that has this support, however. I am a bit nervous about getting deluged in bug reports about various functionality in unicode-2 causing breakage, but perhaps as long as we specify that this is an experimental branch in README.Debian, it might not be too bad.

[Will Farrington (wcfarrington)]

Actually, I could live with "emacs-snapshot-unicode2". That would definitely be a livable solution for me. =)