[cairo] Release management for Cairo

[Bill Spitzak]

If somebody really wants to get in there and get development started on
this again, that would be great! Maybe Cairo can be saved. There was hope
once upon a time that all the toolkits would use Cairo for drawing. Instead
all the toolkits are writing their own rendering code, a redundant waste of
resources. Imagine if all that work had gone into Cairo!

The xlib backend is partially implemented by pixman and that has been a
problem as there is even less maintenance of that. If I understand
correctly, pixman is supposed to be in the X server, but such remote
rendering is used very little, or none, by Cairo (the xlib backend triggers
a switch to local rendering in many cases, and Wayland does not support
remote rendering at all). It is obvious the X server is not passing
everything through unchanged to pixman, making the idea that local and
remote rendering can share code by reusing the pixman api not work in
practice. I think it would be a good idea to dump pixman (and remote xlib
rendering), moving the code to Cairo xlib backend and (hopefully) cleaning
it up.

On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 9:03 AM Uli Schlachter <psychon at znc.in> wrote:

> Am 25.04.21 um 19:12 schrieb Emmanuele Bassi:
> [..]
> >  - Xlib
> >  - XCB
>
> P.S.: AFAIK cairo-xcb started as a fork of cairo-xlib that then got a
> rewrite. Or three. It would be nice to merge them into a single
> cairo-x11 backend.
>
> Once upon a time, I suggested removing cairo-xlib and relying on the
> existing cairo-xcb-xlib mechanism to provide the cairo-xlib API. This
> was rejected because it would introduce new bugs. The existing
> cairo-xlib bugs are at least known.
>
> Providing cairo-xcb ontop of cairo-xlib is not possible, so back then I
> started working on a little cairo-internal X11 abstraction that could
> then be implemented for both xcb and xlib. I did this by starting from
> the existing cairo-xlib backend so that (hopefully) no new bugs are
> introduced. I stopped (in 2017, according to git) because I didn't
> really see the point anymore (neither backends had any activity, so
> trying to merge them also had little gain).
>
> Anyway, why I explain this:
> If wanted / deemed useful, I can try to continue working on this.
> --
> “Some people are worth melting for.” - Olaf
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>
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