[cairo] Breaking the dependency on libX11

[Behdad Esfahbod]

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Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> Hello,

Hi,

> OS distributors tend to compiler cairo with all backends enabled,
> which means that libcairo drags in libX11.

Yes, unfortunately this is the case we build cairo as a single .so.

> Some non-GUI tools such as rrdtool are starting to link with libcairo
> to render into PNGs and the like.  This creates a nasty dependency
> chain for headless web servers that drags in a bunch of X11 client
> libraries, libxcb, and more.
> 
> Would this be solvable by dlopen()ing libX11 at run time, only when an
> X11 surface is needed?

Not really.

> Alternatively, would you recommend to ship a second copy of Cairo built
> with --disable-xlib and install it as libcairo-minimal or something
> like that?

That's one option.  And distros can do that today.  I know Debian has
installs a version of cairo only with the directfb backend enabled.  In
the longer term, we may want to make cairo generate finergrained .so's.
 That comes at a cost though, but I'll take a look into it.

behdad

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