Comment 35 for bug 1437260

a) @Martin K., wtf happened to Craig, is he fine? (pm me in doubt)

b) in any case this is apparently unmaintained bitrot - and that's neither an "excuse" nor a "reason" for the bug - it's an "explanation"

c) it /is/ a hell lot of rather opaque code, but as mentioned most of it seems to go into a custom font renderer.
My personal assumption would be that this could just be omitted, but I have no knowledge on why it's therer itfp. (I first and only glimpsed at the code on that one occasion)

With the author/maintainer absent, one may simply resort to that and see what other bugs cook up (then simply revert the commit on trouble)

d) nothing of all that excuses the attitude of some people here around. It annoys you? Hell, just fix it. You can't? Well, find somebody. In doubt set a bounty. You can neither? The you got to live with it.

Reporting bugs is important and a valuable contribution, but the first answer to "why is it not yet fixed? why is it not yet fixed?" is always "because you didn't fix it?"
And you better start begging that Craig is ok and just moved on.

For any solution:
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Iff Craig won't return, we'll need somebody to pick the component as maintainer (and fix it).
That is important because the "fix" may break other things and somebody has to care about it.

If you want to give it a try (assuming the scary fontconfig code gone, it should actually not be very hard - it's a choice the maintainer has to take; i'm not too convinced that the custom rendering can be rescued with the changesto Qt5), feel free to ask for advise and help anytime (ideally on the kde-devel mailing list)

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> > > It makes Plasma look amateurish.
> No, It MAKES Plasma/KDE amateurish!
And how do we call people who use amateurish software? :-P