linebender / linebender/norad

API to change UFOs in-place

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#210 5 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
61
Forks
16
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Currently, every write erases the complete UFO directory and writes a fresh copy from memory.

It would be nice to be able to "commit a changeset" to a UFO where you only change what you marked for change. Add a glyph, modify another, delete a third, and then only those 3 changes hit the disk:

1. Update contents.plist of the target layer with the addition and deletion and write it to disk,
2. Write the added and modified glyph file to disk,
3. Delete the third glyph file from disk.

I am imagining a `ChangeSetBuilder` where you could queue up these add/change/remove events. Maybe you wouldn't even need to read the entire UFO from disk but just apply the changes where needed? It could even have events for other things like lib, kerning, groups entries.

The primary use-case would be to avoid IO churn, accidentally changing the formatting of existing files (bleh) and maybe better supporting file watching tools?

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing the current UFO write path and how contents.plist and glyph files are handled. Define the changeset API and its supported add, modify, and remove operations; done means only affected files are updated while unrelated file contents remain unchanged.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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