[cairo] surfaces and backends

[Carl Worth]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 17:31:24 -0500, "Dominic Lachowicz" wrote:
>
> That's not entirely the case. One can always document it as (I
> sloppily do below):

OK. I'll give an honest effort at it this time. I would say:

  * @cairo_surface_type_t is used to describe the type of a given
  * surface. The surface types are also known as "backends" or "surface
  * backends" within cairo.
  *
  * The type of a surface is determined by the function used to create
  * it, which will generally be of the form cairo_<backend>_surface_create,
  * (though see cairo_surface_create_similar as well).
  *
  * The surface type can be queried with cairo_surface_get_type() and
  * compared with values of the form cairo_<backend>_surface_type
  * which are defined in the appropriate cairo-<backend>.h header
  * files.
  *
  * See [somewhere] for more documentation on the list of currently
  * available surface backends.

So, obviously, it's possible to document things that way. But the end
result is that the programmer is going to have to type a string of
characters without seeing it directly in this documentation. And I
still haven't come up with a way to provide a link to where the magic
string of characters does appear in the documentation.

If we had out-of-tree backends, we wouldn't have much choice. But we
don't, so I don't see what benefit there is to this approach. (Compare
to the version I wrote earlier in the thread that includes all the
enum values here.)

-Carl
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