From cairo Sun Apr 25 23:36:52 2021 From: "James K. Lowden" Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2021 23:36:52 +0000 To: cairo Subject: Re: [cairo] Release management for Cairo Message-Id: <20210425193652.baf198a15da793666defbb6e () schemamania ! org> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=cairo&m=161939434306702 On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 18:12:23 +0100 Emmanuele Bassi 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 -- cairo mailing list cairo@cairographics.org https://lists.cairographics.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo