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The Release Notes for v6.1.2 note:

The following changes are likely to occur in the next or subsequent non-maintenance release: The engine (both IDE and standalone) will require gtk, gdk, glib, pango and xft on Linux

Which of those are not currently required, and how feasible is it to make them optional when running a standalone with -ui?

For GUI apps those dependencies make a lot of sense and should pose no problem on modern systems. But I use standalones for a lot of server and other faceless apps, and I'm concerned about the possibility of having future versions of these apps break when these GUI libs become required.

If there's any practical way those could be ignored when running with -ui I'd be very grateful.

@Fourthworld: All those libraries are weakly-linked, and there's no real reason to change that moving forward... All it really means is 'if you want UI functionality (windows and such) you'll need to have them installed'. As -ui mode doesn't use any of those APIs it won't cause a problem.

The only definite dependency (although still weakly linked) I think we've introduced in 6.5 is that you need pango for rendering text... This goes even for -ui mode when using export snapshot.

Excellent - thanks, Mark.

One last question on this: the Server version now has the ability to export images, yes? Is this also available to Linux standalones running with -ui?

In theory - yes... In practice, there appears to be an issue with -ui mode we introduced in 6.5-dp-2 - it crashes on startup. I'll file it as a bug.

Okay - just realized I was launching the wrong engine in the wrong way to test that... So 'export' does work on a standalone in -ui mode, however, text appears to be rendered at the wrong x-location. So two bugs to file - firstly passing '-ui' to the IDE engine causes a crash, and secondly text rendering seems a tad wonky in -ui mode in standalones (at least on Mac).

UPDATE: Bugs filed - 11331 and 11332.

This is a very exciting prospect for both a project I'm working on now and several in the future. Thanks!