[cairo] The Great API Shakeup

[Carl Worth]

This last weekend, several cairo developers happened to be in the same
physical room, (as part of XDevConf[*]).

We took advantage of the opportunity and had a very productive meeting
last night in which we tried to discuss as many open API issues as
possible.

The following people were involved in this ad-hoc meeting:

Kristian Høgsberg, David Reveman, Keith Packard, Owen Taylor, Carl Worth

The meeting was also attended by Jim Gettys and Bdale Garbee, without
whose support we could not have been productive.

Kristian took some good notes on the discussion last night, which
we'll be cleaning up and sending out as a bunch of separate proposals
to the list. Hopefully this stream of little proposals will be easier
to digest than one giant summary of the meeting. And, this way any
sub-discussions that spin off should be easier to manage.

We'll include "API Shakeup" in each of the proposals, and we'll try to
tie them into existing open threads as appropriate. Each
mini-proposal will be followed up with a patch proposal to implement
the change, (and each patch must include documentation).

Then, of course, once any new discussion settles down, we can start
committing all of this stuff. The scope of the changes means that all
existing cairo-using code will have to be updated, (eg. we have a
proposal that changes cairo_create). So, the breakage will be a bit
painful. But hopefully, the work needed to bring forward any single
piece of code will actually be quite minor.

As this process wraps up, we'll pull together a single-source guide on
what people need to do to get their code updated.

Anyway, this should be a lot of fun. And we should have an
easier-to-use, and less warty API when we're done.

If anyone has pet peeves regarding API issues in cairo, this will be
the time to bring them up, because we won't want to go through many
more break-every-application changes again for quite some time.

-Carl

[*] X Developers' Conference
    http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/XDevConf
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