Update to more recent version?

[m-ad]

Right now this fontconfig feedstock is based on the current "stable" version of fontconfig, 2.13.1, which was released in 2018. However, the most recent version of fontconfig is 2.13.94 (2.14 RC4) from 2021-06-28, which contains several useful fixes.

Dear maintainers, would you consider updating this feedstock to use a more recent fontconfig version? I understand if you want to stick to the old "stable" version, but given that it is quite old I see value in getting a more recent version up on conda-forge.

[ocefpaf]

I agree that "stable" is relative and sometimes we don't get as many releases as we would like. Publishing the RC4 can be done in a dev branch [1]. However, if the fixes are really important we can maybe backport some of them as a patch? To be honest I'm not too sold on the idea. We do have an exception on cfep-05 for packages that are not published frequently or are in an eternal state of "dev" but are important for the stack. Do you mind listing some of these important fixes to help us make a decision?

[1] https://github.com/conda-forge/cfep/blob/main/cfep-05.md

[m-ad]

Having a "dev" (or "rc") channel seems like a good idea in this case.

I don't have a list of important fixes. Personally, I became aware of the issue while having problems to install weasyprint from conda on Windows, and I suspect that issue is related to the conda-forge version of fontconfig being 2.13.1.

My main argument would be that the list of changes since 2018 seems long enough to motivate an update. However, I do not know how much work such an update (or adding an "rc" version) would require and whether the benefits justify the effort. That's why I just asked whether you would consider it.

[pkgw]

Do we have a sense as to whether 2.14 will be coming soon? It looks like the 2.13.9X releases have been coming out very slowly, so probably not, but if a mainline release is coming soon, maybe we can skip the added complexity of adding a dev/rc branch.

[Tobias-Fischer]

Hiya, I am interested in getting a newer version as well. I want graphicsmagick on osx-arm64 (see conda-forge/graphicsmagick-feedstock#17), which in turn needs gnuplot, which needs fontconfig .. however, the gnuplot tests fail with the old fontconfig version, but pass with the latest 2.13.94. Is that enough of a justification? :)

[pkgw]

Based on the release history of fontconfig, I think I'd be in favor of updating to 2.13.94 on the main branch at this point, as a CFEP-05 exception. This series might not be billed as "stable" but based on the rate at which it's evolving it seems clear that it's fairly solid.