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8. The libraries

There are several shared libraries installed by the Linux Console Tools. They were at first meant just to share code betwwen the various utilities (kbd has lots of duplicated code), but they could be used as a base to build new tools.

However, they are not yet ready for production use (hence the version number 0.0.0), and are absolutely not complete nor coherent at the time.

Here is a summary of what they are meant to become:

8.1 libconsole, <lct/console.h> + <lct/ksyms.h>

is a meant to be a collection of:

• wrappers around the kernel-level functionnalities, which should be as kernel-version-independant as reasonable;
• higher-level interfaces to these functionnalities.

Maybe this goal overlaps with some part of libggi (see The future), but I didn't investigate that for now.

8.2 libcfont, <lct/font.h>

is meant to provide a high-level interface to console-font file-handling. It also exports the lower-level functions used to construct higher-level ones.

It only supports for now some low- to medium-level functions that ease writing programs, but I hope to make it a lot more than that, especially with the coming of the XPSF file-format (see doc/font-formats/xpsf.draft for details).

As of release 1998.08.11, implementation of higher-level interface has just started.

8.3 libctutils, <lct/utils.h> + <lct/unicode.h>

is a collection of misc utility functions for use by the 2 other libs and by the tools. I hope most this stuff will one day make its way to an existing general purpose utility-library. Any offers welcomed.