Day 17

Updating SharpFont

Tonight I decided I should give SharpFont a little attention since I’ve been doing a lot of good work on SharpNav lately. I left off with SharpFont working on Windows 64-bit without needing to be recompiled but with some inconsistencies with the binaries, an ever-expanding Dependencies folder filled with binary files, and a downstream that couldn’t use the latest version.

So I first tackled the issue of a having a very large Dependencies folder. The issue, if you don’t know, is that git is pretty bad with binary files when compared against how it handles text files. If I keep on adding binary files to the repository, it will eventually be very slow to clone and work with in general. So the solution was to split the subtree for the Dependencies folder and throw it into a separate repository, SharpFont.Dependencies, that would be referenced in SharpFont as a git submodule.

The process was very smooth, and it all works perfectly right now.

I still need to go through and update the binaries, as well as provide 2.5.4 and 2.5.5 binaries — which will happen tomorrow.

The last issue is that OpenRA is still on 2.5.0.1 instead of 2.5.3. I’m planning on forking OpenRA and fixing all the breaking changes introduced with this latest version (which will be released in a few day’s time), as well as modifying their dependency fetching script to download the correct version of freetype6.dll from the new repository.

I also went through and updated everything in the project’s README.md.

So not a whole lot happened tonight, and I’m going to blame that on Skyrim :P

Originally published at 100daysofhacking.com on January 11, 2015.