[cairo] Time for a release ?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 12:49:00PM +0100, Antony Lee wrote:
> re: test images & library versions:
> I don't know much about the cairo testing system, but wearing my Matplotlib
> (www.matplotlib.org) developer hat on, I would like to point out that the
> text rasterization output from FreeType is definitely not stable: it can
> change (at the pixel level) even between bugfix releases.  The solution on
> Matplotlib's side (which also needs reference images for test comparisons)
> was to pick a blessed version/build config of FreeType (2.6.1) and always
> run tests against that version.  Not the most elegant, but it works...
> On cairo's side I guess this could reasonably be automated (perhaps) by
> adding a script that builds the relevant FreeType version and LD_PRELOADs
> it before running the tests.

Right, that's basically the approach I was alluding to - regenerating
the reference images on the local system and then fixing the dependency
versions (not just FreeType but all dependencies), with Cairo's git tree
as the only free variable.  That allows for reliable apples-to-apples
comparisons.

Where I ran into a hitch with this approach was when changes in Cairo
required a newer version of a dependency (this tends to happen
relatively often with Pixman - new features in Cairo often require new
features in Pixman).  Unfortunately, that's also exactly when you least
want hitches in the CI...

Bryce

> On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 9:16 AM Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 05:21:12PM +0100, Uli Schlachter wrote:
> > > > Is it worth looking into funding options to support admin work like
> > this ?
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > Feel free. The current infrastructure runs on freedesktop.org. I am
> > > actually not sure how the funding works here.
> >
> > Freedesktop merged to the X.org Foundation a couple years ago.  Funding
> > the CI has been a concern, but Cairo is a very minor impact on that
> > since we have relatively few changes compared with other projects under
> > the X.org umbrella.
> >
> > That said, if you do want to donate to X.org on Cairo's behalf, here's
> > the page you want:
> >
> >     https://www.x.org/wiki/XorgFoundation/Donations/
> >
> > Bryce
> > --
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> > cairo at cairographics.org
> > https://lists.cairographics.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo
> >