Open corliss opened 7 years ago
Freetype can be built without harfbuzz. In fact I think that's the case for the windows freetype dll, since building harfbuzz on windows with Ms tools is a pain.
Not really. It would be frustrating / surprising / upsetting to the end user If he/she uses a combined assembly against plain non-harfbuzz enabled freetype. If you combine the repo, the expectation would be to stop supporting non-harfbuzz-linked freetype. Not every apps needs harfbuzz - though I bundle harfbuzz-enabled freetype, strictly speaking font validator does not need any harfbuzz related functionality.
SharpFont.HarfBuzz depends on SharpFont for the hafbuzz APIs that depend on freetype. I was originally thinking it would be cleaner where 1 nuget package/assembly = 1 repo, but this gets cumbersome when the assemblies have dependencies on each other.
Moving to a system where there will only ever be 2 repos (SharpFont for code, SharpFont.Dependencies for binary deps) makes sense to me. I will first merge in your PR, we can work on changing this structure, then I will do another release on NuGet (which is long overdue).
You could do it via git submodule, without merging the two repos.
This is already done via submodule: https://github.com/Robmaister/SharpFont.HarfBuzz/tree/master/Dependencies
It only serves to make the process more complicated for devs. I don't see any inherent benefits, only drawbacks of having at least two copies of the SharpFont + SharpFont.Dependencies repos, and possible submodule breakage (or forgetting to init them upon cloning).
A submodule for the binary deps makes sense as it offloads all of the big files elsewhere and keeps the main repo clean/light.
It would be convenient to have a single repo for all SharpFont code, including SharpFont.HarfBuzz and any other assemblies created going forward. I can't think of a good reason to have a separate repo for SharpFont.HarfBuzz, since you own both projects and since they cater to basically the same audience, and also have the same dependencies. The Dependencies repo would continue to be separate since it has large binaries.
Note: The generated assemblies and nugets don't need to change - there would still be a
SharpFont
nuget and aSharpFont.HarfBuzz
nuget. This is just about reducing the number of repos.