[Cairo] Re: Xrender transforms...

[Sven Luther]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 02:52:22PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> [ Setting the Reply-To to the cairo list, since I think xr at xwin.org
>   is supposed to be dead ]
> 
> On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 13:05, Sven Luther wrote:
> 
> > > How does 'gnome' get built for debian?
> > 
> > There is one gnome-libs source package, which generate the various
> > library packages (lignome32, libgnomeui32, ...). I don't know if the
> > tarballs are pristine upstream ones, or if they are doctored to be made
> > one tarball.
> 
> Actually, this is not the case for GNOME 2. For GNOME 2 there are
> separate libgnome and libgnomeui source tarballs.

Yes, i know, i was only speaking about the debian gnome 2 packages.

> I think it's least confusing if the upstream packages correspond
> closely to the binary packages on a particular distribution
> (except for libfoo, libfoo-dev type division.) The Red Hat GNOME
> packages all work like that; we never split one source tarball
> into multiple functionally distinct binary packages.

But then, redhat don't ships as many package as debian does, and you
have to take archive bloat and bandwith and maintainership cost and
other such in account, but then, i am hardly the right person to ask
about that.

But then, i seriously doubt that even if you go this way that it would
make sense to have a separate slim package.

> One thing you could look at is:
> 
>  ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v1.3/gtk+-all-1.3.7.tar.gz 
> 
> It's basically glib/pango/gtk+ packaged together into a big
> tarball, with an appropriate toplevel configure.ac. 
> We developed support in pkg-config to do this kind of setup,
> and it could presumably be used for the libic/libpixregion/cairo
> comglomerate.

Yep, that would be a nice solution.

> However, the fact that the last time we did this was GTK+-1.3.7
> and there have been 30 or so releases since then does indicate
> something: it was always a real pain to get the -all
> tarball to distcheck succesfully - it was just too big and
> complicated, and we never checked that it worked except at
> release time.

Exactly, but cairo is not (yet ?) even comparable in size to gtk or
gnome, isn't it ?

Having 4 smallish source package which each build depend on the other is
a pain, and can cause terrible havoc to the autobuilder network (which
each in turn have to wait for the 4 others to be built, accepted,
installed, and so it would take 4 autobuilder cycle to build them. And
then, if you are not strict enough in the dependencies, it can happen
that one some architectures, cairo is built against an older version of
the other libraries and such, which is something that can quickly become
a maintenance nightmare.

> I think combining libpixregion and libic into a single package
> makes a lot of sense. In fact, I think combining them into
> a single library makes a lot of sense; a 14k library like
> libpixregion just is not a good tradeoff given the way that
> ELF works.

Yes, that would be a good step.

But what about slim. Surely 3 smallish include files don't warrant a
separate package too.

> I'm not sure doing anything special to go from 2 libraries to 
> 1 library makes sense. The problem is more external dependencies
> (freetype, fontconfig, expat) and quasi-dependencies on some systems
> (Xrender).

They are already packaged by most distrib, so you just need to depend on
them, and everything should work out fine.

> To put it another way, to get just GTK+ built starting from a 
> stock non-Linux system requires you to build (for 2.2)
> 
>  libiconv/gettext/libpng/libjpeg/libtiff/expat/fontconfig/
>  FreeType/Xrender/Xft2/glib/pango/atk/gtk+
> 
> And that point, 1 library versus 2 libraries for Cairo doesn't
> matter a lot.

I will let you know the response of the debian ftp-masters when i will
upload the slim package :))) 

Friendly,

Sven Luther