[cairo] Congratulations to cairo Summer-of-code participants

[Carl Worth]

The cairo graphics project is delighted to announce three student
projects that have been accepted into Google's Summer of Code
program. These projects give students a fantastic opportunity to gain
first-hand experience with the cairo community while also making a
valuable contribution. We hope that all participating students have so
much fun with cairo  that their involvement will continue long after
the summer is over.

The details of the three projects are

  Scan-converting rasterizer
	Student: Joonas Pihlaja
	Mentor:  Carl Worth

	Joonas will be integrating a new scanline-based polygon
	rasterizer into cairo's software-rendering stack. Previous
	demonstrations from David Turner and others show that there
	are some significant performance benefits to this approach.

  Merge XCB/Xlib backends
	Student: Thomas Coppi
	Mentor:  Ian Osgood

	Thomas will be combining cairo's xlib and xcb backends to
	share as much as possible. This will eliminate code
	duplication and bring several missing features to the xcb
	backend. An ideal result will be "supported" status for the
	xcb backend when the project is complete.

  Add HDR image surface type to cairo/pixman
	Student: Guofu Xie 
	Mentor:  Søren Sandmann

	Xie will be implementing support for high-dynamic-range (HDR)
	images in cairo (through pixman). This effort will extend
	currently ongoing work to extend pixman's capability to color
	channels with more than 8 bits each.

Congratulations to Joonas, Thomas, and Xie!

At this point, the first thing that all students should do is to
subscribe to the cairo mailing list. Subscription instructions are
here:

	http://cairographics.org/lists/

This list is the primary place where discussion about your project
should take place. It's a friendly place with many very smart and
helpful people interested in cairo.

Of course, you are free to email your mentor directly, but I'll
encourage all mentors to steer any technical discussion back to the
cairo list. [Mentors, if you get any direct email form students with
technical content, please direct the discussion back to the cairo
list.]

You've also got Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org> as the admin
contact for cairo and GSoC. So he's the person to talk to if you're
having any problems such as an unresponsive mentor, (but again, and
advantage of using the public list is that you won't even have to tell
Behdad about a problem like that---it will already be apparent to him
if your mentor isn't replying on the list).

Once you're subscribed, let us know by sending an email to the list
introducing yourself, telling us a little bit about your project, and
perhaps asking some initial questions, or describing your plans.

Then, a next important step is to start getting familiar with cairo's
source code if you're not already. We use git to manage the source, so
you'll want to be familiar with it as well. Here's one introduction to
git, (and if it's confusing anywhere, I want to know):

	http://cworth.org/hgbook-git/tour/

Once you've got git installed, you can clone the pixman and cairo
projects like so (as described on cairographics.org/download):

	git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/cairo

	git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/pixman

Then look at cairo's README and INSTALL for building instructions,
ensure you can build both libraries, and pleas let us know if you have
any questions.

Once again, congratulations on your acceptance, and welcome to the
cairo community.

We hope you have lots of fun with cairo!

-Carl

PS. In addition to the cairo mailing list, you can also find real-time
discussion about cairo via IRC in the #cairo channel on
irc.freenode.net.
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