[cairo] Compiling on old Linuxes

Carl Worth cworth at cworth.org
Fri Oct 9 20:17:03 PDT 2009


Excerpts from Zack Weinberg's message of Fri Oct 09 17:13:23 -0700 2009:
> > Cairo asks the X server what version of the protocol it actually
> > supports, (independent of what version of the library cairo was
> > compiled against), and cairo then avoids using any Render requests
> > newer than supported. Of course, we could always have bugs in that,
> > but it *should* work, (and any such bugs would be fairly trivial to
> > fix).
> 
> That turns out not to be the case... for instance, we're still looking
> for a good solution to
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=468496#c11
> (the actual bug is in the X video drivers, and Render can't tell Cairo
> whether it's using one of the buggy ones)

Right. I was only talking about distinguishing between different
implementations of the Render extension advertising different numeric
versions of the specification.

Distinguishing between implementations that may or may not have bugs
is of course much harder, (since nothing about the numeric version of
the specification says whether there might be bugs in the
implementation).

You can see lots of pain that's gone into cairo trying to work around
bugs like these. Just grep for "buggy" within cairo-xlib-surface.c to
see some evidence of this.

-Carl
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 190 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/attachments/20091009/7b154398/attachment.pgp 


More information about the cairo mailing list