[cairo] Release management for Cairo

[LRN]

On 26.04.2021 23:28, Heiko Lewin wrote:
> On 4/26/21 3:17 PM, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
>> On Mon, 26 Apr 2021 at 11:28, Heiko Lewin wrote:
>>>> In part this is caused by the design of Cairo, which does not match what 
>>>> general purpose computers have been moving towards over the past 15 
>>>> years—dedicated GPU cores with programmable pipelines; but I'd contend that 
>>>> the biggest contributor to the exodus is literally the uncertainty in how 
>>>> Cairo is maintained since Carl Worth (and Chris Wilson) have left the project.
>>>
>>> It's not that I would find the proposal indiscussable ( I have no real
>>> interest in those backends - why not drop PS, Xlib, Win32 and Tee as
>>> well? ), but I do not see a strong reason to do so. Most of the
>>> removal-candidates on your list are listed as experimantal/incomplete.
>>> That's it: if someone has interest in working on those, they are welcome.
>>> Lack of active development, however, cannot be criterion for removal: 
You
>>> would have to throw away far more than those...
>>
>> Why? And, also: why would it be a problem to throw away more code?
> 
> Because all cairo is, is an old library whose API was stable for years and 
> whose only purpose nowadays is not to break existing, lazily maintained 

> applications... That is how it is used. For example, you wouldn't expect cairo 
> to remove or refactor it's API and breaking dependent applications. As the 
> feature set is more or less frozen in this way (GTK wouldn't use cairo anymore 
> if that wasn't the case. You already pointed that out indirectly.), there is no 
> point in making new features easier to implement.
> 

That seems like a job for cairo-2.0. That is to say, a new version of cairo 
that is not necessarily compatible with cairo-1.0 (names are arbitrary; i 
know 
that cairo isn't even 1.0 yet). At least, that's how other projects do this 
sometimes.

-- 
O< ascii ribbon - stop html email! - www.asciiribbon.org

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 840 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/attachments/20210427/3494f36c/attachment.sig>