[cairo] enumeration of backends

[Øyvind Kolås]

* David Reveman <c99drn at cs.umu.se> [040520 15:40]:
> On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 14:17 +0200, Øyvind Kolås wrote:
> > 
> >  another thing that would be useful, is choosing which backend actually
> >  feeds the image backend, and thus the png backend, this could be used
> >  to hardware accelerate creation of png images on a webserver.
> 
> This is a great idea!
> 
> However changing the backend which feeds the image backend feels a bit
> dangerous. e.g. what if the GL backend feeds the image backend and the
> GL backend needs to fall back to the image backend for some operation.
> 
> Making it possible to control which backend that feeds the png backend
> would be enough.

The png backend is basically just an image backend,. you don't always
want to write pngs tough,. being able to use the glitz backend for
rendering to a memory buffer, would be useful in very many respects.

It would for instance mean that I could use cairo for compositing in my
gggl library, when doing a sofware 'preview' (at the moment I'm porting
everything to floating point), many of my ops can easily be offloaded
through the cairo api, but gggl has the control over memory buffers.

/Øyvind K.

-- 
  .^.
  /V\    Øyvind Kolås, Gjøvik University College, Norway
 /(_)\    <oeyvindk at hig.no> // <pippin at freedesktop.org>
  ^ ^