[cairo] cairo 1.0 and future plans

[Carl Worth]

Hopefully, by now everyone is aware that cairo 1.0 was released. If
not, please see the release announcement:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo-announce/2005-August/000028.html

and consider subscribing to the cairo-announce mailing list:

http://cairographics.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cairo-announce

I would personally like to thank everybody here for the tremendous
amount of effort that has gone into cairo over the past months and
years. While there's still more to be done, I think everyone here
should feel very pleased with the results so far. I know I am, and I'm
grateful to all of you for making it happen.

As far as the "more to be done" goes, I think it's worth some
discussion now as to how future releases should be done.

Obviously, there are things we wanted to get into the 1.0 release that
didn't make it, (for example, non-experimental PostScript and PDF
backends, the glyph cache rewrite, etc.). Do we want to plan some
short-term feature-based releases for these things?

And for the longer-term, do we want to set up a time-based release
schedule for those? Should we piggy-back on the GTK+ schedule since
GTK+ is a primary consumer of cairo, and plan to have major releases
one month in advance of GTK+ releases or so? (One month in advance
would certainly be an improvement over the nearly two weeks later that
we had this time.)

If we do decide we have different short- and long-term development
priorities, we'll also need to coordinate that. I've got some big
changes planned, (like the new tessellator), that wouldn't be
appropriate for short-term stabilization. Branches are one alternative
to deal with that, but I'm not sure we have the capacity to sustain
split development of cairo. I think I'd prefer to restrict use of
branches for things like bug-fix-only branches. Another option would
be to create a fairly hard schedule for any short-term feature-based
releases, so that long-term efforts were not delayed long.

Anyway, I'm interested in hearing opinions and recommendations.

-Carl
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