[Cairo] Why not Xr?

[Justin Bradford]

I don't understand what was so wrong with the original idea: an advanced
DC for X.

All this talk about cross-platform compatibility is out of place. That
should be an entirely different project (named cairo, it seems). Even
cross-X compatibility should be dismissed, since the Render extension
should be a standard component of a modern X server (ie. Sun's problem).

And besides, it's pretty much impossible to do cross-platform right and
not crippled for all cases. Applications doing tricky things are going to
have #ifdef's and code for Xr, GDI+, and Quartz (or whatever Apple calls
theirs). The annoying part of writing applications for multiple platforms
is not the occassional special case, it's the huge bulk of relatively
straight forward stuff that basically just has different function names
on each platform.

X needs Xr, and MacOS and Windows already have their own equivalents. So
why not just assume X and fontconfig and freetype and whatnot, finish Xr,
and get it in the next XFree86 point release?

Justin