[cairo] UserFontFace vs FtFontFace management (cairomm)

[Jonathon Jongsma]

Ian Britten wrote:
> Jonathon Jongsma wrote:
> 
>> Yes, thank you.  This does seem like the proper way to do things, and I spent this weekend 
>> redesigning things to work this way.  With those changes, things work just as you would 
>> expect them to (e.g. Ian's issue with needing to keep a reference to the UserFontFace 
>> object no longer exists).  However, I have not pushed this out, because the changes are 
>> quite invasive, and it would mean that we'd essentially be breaking the API/ABI of 
>> cairomm, which is obviously a big deal for projects using cairomm.  So I'm still thinking 
>> about the proper way to proceed...
> 
> Introduce it as a new/separate class?  (And eventually phase out the
> current class)
> Obviously there's maintenance overhead to this approach, but it's
> what I often have to do when an existing class needs a major overhaul
> and I don't want to break existing users.
> 
> [ OTOH, isn't all the User Font stuff new in 1.8, and you're only on
> 1.7?  If so, can't you still change it?  That's the only reason I
> opened this discussion... ]

Yes, I can change the UserFontFace stuff as much as I want and not worry about API/ABI 
stability.  The breakage I'm talking about is if I change the behavior of RefPtr, which 
would affect every class, not just the new UserFontFace class.

-- 
jonner