Re: Platform

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2009-05-05 at 21:59 +0200, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> Hi Shaun
> 
> Il giorno mar, 05/05/2009 alle 14.05 -0500, Shaun McCance ha scritto:
> 
> > Recommended
> > ===========
> > 
> > Cairo -- Incredible drawing library, used by GTK+.  There
> > seems to be general agreement that developers should use
> > Cairo when they need to do custom drawing.
> > 
> 
> I do not think that putting cairo (and to some lesser extent d-bus and
> libxml) in the same bucket of gstreamer or e-d-s is an accurate
> representation to communicate to ISDs: cairo is used by any app which is
> using gtk and offers (at least afaik) the same api and abi guarantees.
> It just happens to be an external dependency because its developement
> extends beyond gnome and its schedule.

Sorry, I should have been more clear.  The sections
in this email were just for this email.  I didn't
intend for them to reflect sections in the Overview
itself.

> I feel it should be mentioned in a separate section (Foundations?) along
> with xorg, xlib, fontconfig, pixman and maybe even d-bus and libxml

That's the kind of input I'm looking for.  There are
numerous technologies that we build on but don't push.
So, for instance, X is certainly at the core of of all
our graphical technologies, but it's almost completely
hidden from an API perspective.  We don't spend a lot
of documentation effort telling people about all the
cool things they can do with X.

So do we treat Cairo as an implementation detail, or
is it something we talk up?  My thoughts are that if
you're doing anything non-trivial, you're probably
going to need to do some custom drawing outside of
what GTK+ provides.  Cairo is extremely cool, and I
think we should communicate that.

--
Shaun