[cairo] pixman?

[Thomas Stover]

quick question from the clueless: Being a very light participant in this 
list, I keep reading references to something called pixman. So I finally 
got around to trying to figure out what that is, and all I can find are 
some comments leading me to think it is some sort of cairo helper 
library for raster image buffers/pixel routines. After still not finding 
a download or a doc, I thought to look maybe in the cairo source. No 
dice there either. I currently use some functions I put together for 
from reading the cairo docs to read write pixels on cairo image 
surfaces, but to say they could be better would be an understatement. 
Would somebody clue me in? How far off are my guesses?