[cairo] [Fwd: problem building cairo 1.6.4 on slightly older linux]

[Charles Doutriaux]

Thx Carl,

It helps a lot, I've been unsuccesfully trying to get them to upgrade... 
So I guess i'll go witth the build myself options...
Just on a note, would it be possible for cairo to detect this issue at 
configure time? (old Xrender) I'm thinking it would be useful so that 
cairo will build and work (even with low performance). Because right now 
it picked up an xrender.h and went on happily, unfortunately it was sooo 
old it actually did not work a run time. (i know it's probably too much 
work for just a once or twice issue, but who knows...)

On my end if i ever get to write such a test i'll pass it along of course.

Thx,

C.


Carl Worth wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:24:33 -0700, Charles Doutriaux wrote:
>   
>> Thanks for looking into it,  I figured that much, but it's for a user
>> that has only access to some really old machines. Is there a way around it?
>>     
>
> Install lots of new software on the old machine, (likely not a simple
> task).
>
>   
>> What happens if i turn off xrender? what will be broken in cairo?
>>     
>
> Cairo should always render correctly regardless of which backends you
> enable. (And if it doesn't, let us know.)
>
> As for cairo's xrender support, if you are running cairo against an X
> server that doesn't have the X Render extension, then it doesn't
> matter whether you compile the xrender support into cairo or not,
> (since it won't be able to use it at runtime anyway). So in that case,
> passing the --disable-xlib-xrender option when configuring your cairo
> compile will likely be the easiest way to get something "working".
>
> BUT... using cairo with an X server without the X Render extension is
> also very slow. So your best bet for performance is to get a newer X
> server, with the associated Xrender library, and to building cairo
> with --enable-xlib-xrender against that stuff. And the easiest route
> toward getting all that is likely to install a recent distribution
> that has all the pieces nicely packaged.
>
> But you certainly have many option.
>
> I hope that helps explain things. Have fun with cairo!
>
> -Carl
>