[cairo] Interested in XCB (but not GSoC)

[Felix Rabe]

Hi,

I recently found an interest to start programming a level below GTK+,
i.e. with XCB, and would like to use Cairo for the drawing there.  I
thought of XCB as being the "new cool thing" (compared to XLib) to write
X clients, so I'm astonished to read on the GSoC ideas page that XCB is
not maintained.

I would like to keep in touch with what is going with the XCB backend
and cooperate with Thomas Coppi if I eventually find the time and / or a
patch to contribute.  I study Christian Theology and thus have
completely different priorities and won't be available to join GSoC, but
I am a hacker at heart too and would like to find new ways of using
computers.  I own an OLPC XO-1 (G1G1; I use that to learn Hebrew
currently) and will buy an OpenMoko device ASAP (summer) and like to
experiment with user interfaces both on "desktop computers" and on those
devices.

I mainly program in Python, but am fluent in C, some C++, and use Git
wherever possible.

My specific interests right now concerning XCB are:

- Does Cairo-XCB work at all?  (Not tested yet, will compile in the next
days.)
- How were PS/PDF merged?  (Thomas or somebody, please post your Git
commit hashes or mailing list findings to the mailing list.  I'll do
likewise should I find something first.)
- How do we merge XCB and XLib?
- Who will maintain XCB and/or the merged XCB/Xlib backend?

Caveat: my X programming experience (in contrast to GTK+) is practically
non-existing.  I've just read and tried some of the Xlib and XCB
tutorials that I could find on the net in the past few weeks.  Any
pointers to XCB documentation (guess I'll have to read
http://xcb.freedesktop.org/ProtocolStubApi/ next and print out that
proto postscript thing) and "this is the book you need to read to
understand X" are welcome.

Greetings,
Felix

PS: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6856727143023456694 is the
video that I watched last summer and since that it left me *very*
unsatisfied with any of the current "widgety" user interfaces.  Guys,
let's innovate, it's about time.

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