[cairo] Release management for Cairo

[James K. Lowden]

On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 18:12:23 +0100
Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ideally, I'd like to help with the maintenance of Cairo. I am not an
> expert in the tesselation code, or in font rendering, or in the image
> scaling code; but I can deal with making releases, keeping the CI
> running, automating the website maintenance, triaging issues, and
> fixing the build. More importantly, since Cairo is still a GTK
> dependency, I can spend my work time on those tasks.

Hi Emmanuele, 

Thanks for bringing your ideas and energy to Cairo.  I think your
criticism and direction are well founded, and have a good chance of
succeeding.  That is: be careful what you wish for.  

I volunteered to be a Cairo maintainer last year, when the previous
developer lost his lease (IIUC his employer dropped its support) and
no one else volunteered.  I haven't done much with it, partly because,
like you, I don't know much about the technical problem domain.  Like
you, though, I have some experience with the drudgery of release
engineering (www.freetds.org), and hope to support the project in that
way.  

Unless you get a lot of blowback on the mailing list, I don't see why
we can't make your plan a reality.  

I don't have any love for the autotools, nor any experience with meson.
I have used Cmake and I don't hate it.  For my own projects I write
Makefiles by hand.  That works great right up until Windows.  So my
projects don't build on Windows!  If meson works for GTK, I don't see
how it could be a liability for Cairo.  

I started using Cairo because Keith Packard mentioned it to me when I
sent him an update for his Xft tutorial. IMO Cairo is theoretically
sound because, like Postscript, it's a page-description language,
except minimized: the graphic functions are a C library, and flow
control is managed in the host language.  My only real interest is in
displaying text, along the lines of what a PDF viewer does.  

i haven't used Gnome for ages, 15 years at least.  I gave up on it,
finally, because it was a bother and (to me) not much use. I opted to
use Apple for the GUI and X11 on XQuartz.  That gave me integrated
email, web, audio, and video, something Gnome barely seemed to aspire
to.  I didn't want to update my web browser every other week, or
configure alsa, or whatever.  

I don't understand why Gnome prefers GL to Cairo, but then there are
many Gnome/GTK design choices I don't understand.  *I* would never try
to design an object oriented system with C, a language that doesn't
support overloaded functions and operators.  But, you know: he who
writes the code makes the choices.  (These days, I've come to believe
OO was a complete sham in the first place, with no technical merit or
theoretical foundation.  But how was I to know?)  

Let's see what sparks fly, and then think about how to proceed.  

Kind regards, 

--jkl