Re: Sawfish building patch

[John Harper <jsh unfactored org>]

Federico Mena Quintero writes:
|> Imlib still works better for sawfish than gdk-pixbuf does, so I don't
|> want to remove the possibility of using it
|
|Why is this?  I'd like to fix any shortcomings in GdkPixbuf that make it
|less preferable than Imlib.

It's a combination of things:

1. Imlib was specifically designed to handle images for a window
manager, so it works pretty well for that.

The most obvious example is that it supports scaling images with an
unscaled border region. Gdk-pixbuf doesn't, so sawfish has to do that
by hand, and it's slowish (and possibly buggy in some corner cases)

2. I think Imlib uses less memory than the gdk-pixbuf+GdkRGB
combination (GdkRGB allocates huge buffers on startup that account for
a large percentage of sawfish's memory use)

3. There are some bugs that only appear when sawfish uses gdk-pixbuf,
e.g. doing partial exposes of window border regions seems not to work
sometimes (this is probably a sawfish bug)

And I think there were some other really strange bugs that appeared
when Mandrake (?) starting compiling sawfish with gdk-pixbuf (they gave
up and resorted to Imlib. Again this is probably something in sawfish
that should be fixed, maybe to do with X errors)

So in summary, it would be good to fix the gdk-pixbuf bugs in sawfish,
but until then I don't recommend people compile sawfish with it (though
I use it that way everyday, without any observed problems apart from
the exposure problem mentioned above)

	John