[cairo] New cairo snippets live on wiki!
Carl Worth
cworth at cworth.org
Fri Aug 3 11:11:17 PDT 2007
First, I want to give a huge amount of thanks to Nis Martensen for
some extremely valuable work he's been doing on the cairographics.org
website. He's been putting in a lot of effort that hasn't always been
visible, but it's extremely appreciated. Here is some of what he's
done recently:
* Monitored the wiki and let us know when it kept failing, (I think
we've got all the permission problems sorted out so that both
git-pushes and web-edits should work now without causing failures).
* Done a lot of boring, thankless work to port wiki content over to
the latest version of ikiwiki.
* Ported Michael Urman's original, off-site, python-based cairo
tutorial so that it is now in C, and within the wiki itself where
anyone can easily extend/improve it:
http://cairographics.org/tutorial/
* Ported Øyvind Kolås's cairo snippets to live within the wiki, so
that for the first time, people can now also easily contribute and
improve the snippets:
http://cairographics.org/samples/
A few more notes on the snippets work in particular. Here are some
other improved aspects of this new version:
* The cairo_snippet_normalize function is no longer used, (which has
long been a source of confusion for new cairo users that were
misled into thinking cairo provided a normalized coordinate system
by default---or they just cut-and-pasted code samples and got
confused as to why they didn't work).
* The snippets using libsvg have been removed, (another source of
confusion as people were led into using this obsolete library).
* Several snippets that weren't demonstrating any obviously useful
concept have been removed, (operators and xxx bug demonstrations,
etc).
And there are also other benefits that come from the ikiwiki
integration:
* New sample pages added will automatically be presented in the list
at cairographics.org/samples.
* That page also now offers RSS/Atom feeds for people to subscribe to
new samples as they get added.
I'm really hopeful that this samples page can become a nice, dynamic
place for people to contribute and share samples of cairo code. Here
are some improvements I'd like to see:
* Some of the existing snippets should be reworked slightly, (some
of the text is getting clipped, or some tests have fairly extraneous
content like the word "void" on the text sample with the word
"hello").
* It would be nice to add some instructions to the page on how to
contribute a new snippet.
* We did lose the XXX snippets, and some of them are certainly still
valid demonstrations of existing bugs. Now that we have a simple
template for including a set of snippets on a page, we could have a
parallel page that presents the bugs. Or, even more interesting, we
could easily provide tagged snippets and provide views of any
snippets with a given tag.
* Currently, the resulting image must be manually generated offline
and uploaded. It would be really slick if someone created an ikiwiki
plugin that would automatically render a snippet. Of course, that
would require some care to avoid malicious code contribution---so
I'm not exactly sure how to make that work, but I'd be open to any
ideas people have.
* Other things that might be interesting would be to present the
snippets in various languages in addition to C, (that is, allow
contributions using a very limited subset of C, and then write a
script to convert that to various other language bindings). This
"limited subset" approach might also help avoid the malicious attack
vectors described above.
* Similarly, it might be nice to provide a link that would allow the
user to download a complete program for any given code snippet,
(and the program could target any desired cairo surface
backend). This part should actually be really easy to do, and might
be as simple as just providing one ikiwiki template per surface
backend.
Again, lots of interesting potential here, (all originally envision by
Øyvind I believe, but now much more easily within reach I
think). Thanks again to Nis for stepping up and helping out with this
stuff.
I really love this community and the way great new people are joining
all the time!
Have fun with cairo, everybody.
-Carl
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