[cairo] bug 4945: six months to fix a bug ?

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi Marc,

Your message pretty much answers itself.  But I highlight some points.
These are my personal thought.  Not representing cairo developers at
all.

  - We are not looking for a "cleaner" patch than that of Eric.  We are
just looking for "clean" patch.  Eric's is definitely not.  You've known
if you had took a little look at it.  As a principle, we do not commit
temporary hacks to cairo.  And I think this is accepted practice to
leave it to distributions to pick temporary hacks.

  - Thank you for telling us what we should be working on.
Unfortunately our view of importance is different from that of yours.
While supporting 8-bit displays is important to us, it has not been
important enough to anyone to fix it cleanly.

behdad


On Thu, 2007-02-01 at 10:36 -0500, Marc Espie wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm not really very interested in cairo, rather in the state of
> OpenBSD in general.
> 
> A loooong time ago, we've had some big issue integrating cairo,
> namely the lack of support for non XRENDER 8 bits display.
> 
> Thanks to the great work of Eric Faurot, we've had a working patch
> in our tree since March 2006. That's almost a year now.
> 
> As a policy, we do not like to keep patches around, especially when
> they're not OpenBSD-specific... While looking at a cairo update, I
> noticed this patch, which is complicated code, is still needed.
> 
> I looked at the bug-reports upstream, in the cairo database. 
> This is bug 4945.
> 
> There is a large discussion, a lot of work from Eric, first with the
> first patch, and now with the updated version.
> 
> I also couldn't fail noticing all the extra bugs linked to this one,
> marked as duplicate, with various setups which show that 8 bit display
> without XRENDER are still quite alive and kicking.
> 
> So, now I am wondering. Why is this bug-report still open, and not some
> form of this patch integrated ?
> 
> >From what I understand, it looks like the cairo developers do not like
> this patch too much, but hey, it does the job doesn't it ? In my world,
> when you run into a bug-fix for an actual problem, you either integrate
> it, or you provide a better fix. In a timely manner. I do not consider
> 9 months to be `timely'.
> 
> You could also tell me to piss off, that 8 bits display without XRENDER
> are a thing of the past... unfortunately, some major players are now
> using cairo, it's a piece of the puzzle needed to compile recent gtk+
> stuff, and lots and lots of applications (I just ran into graphviz 2.12,
> which *requires* a recent cairo to have any kind of non-tcl based gfx
> interface).
> 
> I know, playing with newer displays is fun, and `this is a free software
> project, so no strings attached', yada yada yada.
> 
> But seriously. You've got a major bug, a serviceable patch, and everybody
> is sitting on their thumbs waiting for someone to fix the issue in a
> cleaner way ? 9 months!!! this won't happen. 
> 
> Meanwhile, people like Eric have to fix the patch periodically so it still
> applies to cairo -current.   Other people run into the bug. Vendors from
> various distributions all duplicate the patch from Eric.  This looks like
> an irresponsible waste of people's time to me.
> 
> Integrate the darn patch already.
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-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759