Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (761 mails)

[Raymond Wooninck <tittiatcoke@xxxxxxxxx>]

It seems that my reply from yesterday didn't arrived in the mailing list. 
Therefore please see my reply below. 

On Tuesday, April 17, 2012, Ludwig Nussel <ludwig.nussel@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> so we have the choice between
>   a) enlarging the initrd by including pango
>   b) not display any text or hint at all
>   c) use text mode for prompts
>   d) use an alternative label.so that uses freetype directly instead
>      of pango
>
> a) seems undesirable bloat esp since there is no localization at all
>    in initrd and I doubt that will change until 12.2 (feel free to
>    prove me wrong)
> b) is currently implemented and not satisfactory IMO
> c) fails 1. and 2. and doesn't provide localization either
> d) would fullfil 1. and 2. but would need someone to actually
>    write C code ...

The current state of Plymouth in Factory is that option A was implemented. I 
have added the necessary files to have text support during the boot process. 
The initrd (on my system) grew with about 700Kb and this was also confirmed by 
other people. The whole Pango framework is not required and the only additions 
are: 

usr/share/fonts/truetype/DejaVuSans.ttf
usr/share/fonts/truetype/DejaVuSerif.ttf
usr/lib64/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0.3000.0  (176Kb)
usr/lib64/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0
usr/lib64/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0.3000.0 (52Kb)
usr/lib64/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0
usr/lib64/libpango-1.0.so.0.3000.0 (308Kb)
usr/lib64/libpango-1.0.so.0  
usr/lib64/pango/1.6.0/modules/pango-basic-fc.so  (11Kb)
etc/pango/pango64.modules  (3Kb)
etc/fonts/conf.d/60-latin.conf  
etc/fonts/fonts.conf  (5Kb)

As indicated once they are in the compressed initrd, then the total additional 
space requires is about 700Kb. And most of it is taken by the two font files. 

For me the biggest question mark is that even if we write a new label.so to 
support FreeType, do we still need fonts inside the initrd ?  If so, what 
would be the actual different with using FreeType instead of the indicated 
pango libraries. 

As the current maintainer of Plymouth, I will not accept option C (use text 
mode) and this was also a clear indication from the people on this mailing 
list. Most of them indicated that they would like to see Text support inside 
the boot process and I feel that this would be our opportunity to enhance the 
current openSUSE boot process with more feedback towards the user behind the 
screen. 

Regards

Raymond


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