[cairo] Re: On recovery from errors in cairo (was: cairo reset)

[Mike Emmel]

On 9/24/06, Kalle Vahlman <kalle.vahlman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2006/9/23, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org>:
> > [*] Personally, I think freezing when we did was extremely
> > valuable. It helped a lot for getting some important GTK+/GNOME
> > adoption that is bearing fruit now with things like librsvg,
> > poppler/evince, and the various cairo-based GTK+ canvas efforts. It
> > also helped a lot in getting bigger projects like Mozilla and
> > OpenOffice.org to seriously look into cairo adoption.
>
> Oh, I meant to mention earlier on this point that there is no such
> thing as good and stable API unless there are applications that use
> it. And of course no application will use the API unless it's good and
> stable. So if the developers don't explicitly decide to declare the
> API stable (with the input of early adopters), it will be in a
> standstill situation indefinetly.
>
> So even if it might mean pain in the future, declaring API stable
> early rather than later is worth it in my opinion (and observations).
>

I don't really disagree to be honest.  My concern was that there are a lot of
api editions that are fairly obvious and need to be made.It was not clear to me
that as the api is expanded you won't expose several situations where the best
course of action would be to make a incompatible change.

Its easy when you use cairo to find methods missing from the api which
to be honest  made me a bit  nervous.  Thanks for the responses I feel
a lot better about
how the current api will evolve.

I do have a suggestion.
It  think it would be nice if the ROADMAP and TODO files had the URL
links to the  decision message in threads discussing the future the
changes it makes it a lot easier to understand where cairo is going.
Of course this means you need to make sure and write a final
"executive" summary message that explains the proposal.

For example the ROADMAP has a one liner

User-font API

Google returns this thread.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-May/006893.html

Putting the definitive link in the ROADMAP and TODO files makes life a
lot easier for bumpkins like me to quickly see whats really going on
with cairo.









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> Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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