[tlbuild] ATSUGetAttribute not found

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2011, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> On 15 Apr 2011, at 22:12, David Carter-Hitchin wrote:
>
>> So, what is the plan here? Is someone working on this, does anyone need
>> help with converting the code over?
>
> This would be better asked on the xetex mailing list, really. Anyway, the
> answer is that you can't currently build xetex as a 64-bit OS X program,
> because it uses ATSUI, which Apple decided not to support in the 64-bit
> APIs.  (There are a couple other issues as well, but that's the main one.)
> The solution is to replace the use of ATSUI with the more modern Core Text
> APIs.  If you want to prepare a patch to do this, feel free!  It's not
> particularly difficult, though the APIs are different enough that it
> requires a reasonable understanding of both of them in order to do a good
> job of it.
>
> In the meantime, xetex still works fine as a 32-bit program, of course. I
> can't imagine a real use-case that _needs_ a 64-bit version, though it's
> possible it might have some performance gains.

Hi Jonathan,

technically true, but if I remember correctly compiling xetext (and
xdvipdfmx?) for 32-bit Mac OS X yields plenty of warnings that ATSUI is
deprecated.  Thus I'd think it is high time to replace all that deprecated
stuff.

BTW: we had a somewhat similar problem with libpng: pdfTeX and thus
also luaTeX were using an ancient libpng-1.0.x API that was deprecated
for ages since 1.2.x, started to produce warnings for 1.4.x, and was finally
removed from 1.5.x and we were consequently forced to suddenly switch to the
new API.  I'd hate to be in a similar situation when Apple decides to remove
ATSUI from some future 32-bit version.

Regards
Peter Breitenlohner <peb at mppmu.mpg.de>