Re: GNOME 2.11/2.12 targeting GTK+ 2.8 (ie cairo based)

[Mike Emmel <mike emmel gmail com>]

> No-one was implying that Cairo was a Bad Idea (tm), only whether we
> could be >99% sure of it being as stable as and as fast as the current
> stable GTK+ in a relatively short timescale.

Since Cairo is a pipelined graphics library and most of the original
graphics calls are not routed through cairo Owen ??? the inclusion of
cairo does not have a huge impact on existing applications if its
reasonably stable. And generally 99% of the use cases will be simple
uses of cairo which should be stable.  Now with that said cairo being
a complex 2d library will proabably have a number of issues for some
time both with performance/rendering glitches for more advanced cases
this primarly effects tools such as SVG renderes etc.  Cairo needs to
be fairly stable at the api level for inclusion and should not do bad
things for simple usage but generally the bugs that will exist in it 
don't effect most applications.
Greping through the tree it looks like only a handful of basic cairo
operations are used and if any are and issue I don't see that its hard
to revert back to the "old" renderer for performance in most of these
cases if needed.