Re: [ft-devel] Upstreaming freetype diagnostics patches

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Since you'll be working to fix freetype-change-related breakage in SharpFont,
and before that, you'll likely be working on fixing SharpFont's mono breakage, 
just to make
it possible to build, I added another FAQ with all the relevant information. I 
have included the entire entry
below. Good luck.

https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/wiki/FAQ#what-are-the-heavily-curated-backport-forks-of-sharpfont

 ## What are the "heavily curated" backport forks of SharpFont?

Font Validator uses the ComputeMetrics patches for a few of the
table tests besides the hinting instruction diagnostics (a.k.a. "rasterization 
test").
The ComputeMetrics patches are standard parts of FreeType 2.6.1 and
SharpFont v3.1.0. These are used as they are, for about 6 months
after SharpFont v3.1.0, until b06.

Upstream SharpFont had received from another contributor
a large number of very visual-studio centric re-arrangements
and merges related to developments for mobiles and Window tablets,
and has been completely broken regarding building with
open-source tool chains for some time now.
Upstream is aware of the breakage from a few issues I filed -
It breaks in more ways than one.

Hence Font Validator 2.0 and 2.1 uses heavily curated backport forks of
SharpFont before the above mentioned merge, as well as
incoporating a memory-stream patch from [yet another contributor
which had not been 
merged](https://github.com/Robmaister/SharpFont.Dependencies/pull/5).
The memory-stream patch, which can solve the non-ascii file name
limitations of SharpFont when running under genuine windows
(instead of mono), turn out to have stability problems
and was unhooked in Font Validator after 2.0, before 2.1.
In addition to the memory-stream patch, the heavily curated backport forks
of SharpFont also contains a number of Font Validator related
changes. Most of these are filed upstream in various
stages of potential merges.

They are the "v*+fixes" branches on my SharpFont fork on github.