[cairo] Plans for 1.6?

[Carl Worth]

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:57:03 +0000, Baz wrote:
> However I guess the one thing I want for christmas is, quartz should
> be markked as officially supported.

Yes, let's get there.

> I knocked together the docs changes etc a while back, the only reason
> I've not pushed for it yet is that we fail tests; despite the api
> having been solid since March or so. I'm not sure that we'll be 100%
> with the unit tests by 2008, but marking quartz as supported isn't
> saying that - its just saying that the api is stable, and that we've
> got community support; which I hope is there now since mozilla rely on
> cairo/quartz on mac. Carl?

I have said "should pass the whole test suite" as part of being marked
supported, but that's not exactly true of course, (we still have the
few XFAIL tests for currently supported backends of course[*]).

And it's not even that the automated test suite needs to pass
perfectly either. It's currently much too harsh for things like font
rasterization details that we really don't care about, for example.

The point is that there shouldn't be any "features" that are
missing/broken in quartz, (think clipping, masking, gradients,
etc.). I want people to be able to write an application with Linux/X
and then move it to Mac OS X/quartz and have all the graphics look the
same, (to a human---not necessarily to a bit-counting computer). I
don't want "oh, yeah, that won't work on cairo-quartz". As long as we
have problems like that, we should continue to have the backend marked
as experimental.

And the fallback approach we have in cairo should make this really
simple. That's what let us do "supported" backends for PostScript and
PDF even when they had giant page-size rasterization going on. Now,
obviously we've done a lot of optimization since then, but we've tried
to maintain good fidelity throughout the process.

So there is more than just API stability and community support to
this. I do want the feature set to be trusted and reliable, (not
necessarily bug free of course), from day one.

So the obvious question is, what things are still failing in the test
suite? Are they things where the test suite is being too picky? Could
they be fixed by just doing more fallbacks in the right places? Or is
there something else more fundamental that needs to be done?

Also, finally, on the community/support side, another aspect of a
backend being "supported" is that we really need to commit to doing
good testing of that backend at release time. We've actually not done
a good job of that with win32 already. I know Vlad is working to set
up various systems for autobuilding cairo and hopefully that will
help. Interested humans willing to work closely with me (or others) at
release time will also be greatly appreciated.

> I'll hold off pushing these patches as long as you like; with a bit of
> luck fixing the clipping problem we identified in cairo-quartz this
> week will put it on a par with the other platforms for most things.

That sounds great. If you'd like to post the image results of "make
test" somewhere to get a thumbs up from me, I'd be glad to look at
them.

-Carl

[*] Though we are trying hard to get rid of as many of those as
possible for 1.6.

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