Re: Emacs 23.2 plans

[Jan Djärv]

Chong Yidong skrev:
> Stefan and I plan to begin the Emacs 23.2 pretest in the beginning of
> December.  Accordingly, we will be imposing a freeze on new features
> (i.e., anything that is not a bugfix) within the next few weeks.  The
> target for Emacs 23.2 is March next year; as usual, the actual release
> will depend on how pretesting goes.
>
> If you are planning to make any significant changes to the tree, please
> let us know ASAP (i.e. now), so that we can plan/comment accordingly.

I have completed the GConf/Xsetting code (after way to long time) now and 
would like to check it in.
I don't know if it counts as a major change, but its implications might.

Basically Emacs reads the system font name from GConf and uses that.  It also 
reacts to changes to the system font (can be turned off with a defcustom). 
GConf support can be turned off in configure.

Emacs also listens for font parameter changes made by the user and 
communicated with Xsettings.  These are various Xft-related parameters 
(antialias, hinting, hintstyle, RGBA, DPI and lcdfilter) that are settable by 
the Gnome user settings program (I imagine KDE has something similar).

The upside is that Emacs integrates better to the Gnome desktop and that we 
can control Xft-settings.  After all, if a user changes hinting she probably 
wants it for all applications.  As Emacs now uses the DPI value from Xsettings 
instead of from the X server, fonst look the same.  This isn't the case now, 
Monospace-8 on Emacs and gnome-terminal look quite different.

The downside is that user might be surprised to see the size of their fonts 
change as the DPI value is now different.

What do you think?

        Jan D.