[cairo] Re: Munging header files for export (and other) attributes

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Thu, 1 Sep 2005, Carl Worth wrote:

> I don't know if I'll play the whitespace games I proposed earlier or
> not. They might be a bad idea. But my impression is that I'm the only
> person who ever cared about that anyway, so it's probably not even a
> matter meriting any discussion here anyway. ("Just let crazy old Carl
> arrange that file however he sees best...")
>
> OK. That's far more than enough talk on this subject. Let's see a
> patch, get it into CVS, and move on. (And yes, I do realize that I'm
> the one to blame for dragging this out so much.)
>
> -Carl

No Carl,

You are not the only one who cares about clean header files, and
indeed I enjoy scrolling up and down in cairo.h when writing code
that uses cairo, but having had to develop code that runs on
mobile phones, Unices, and Windows, I know that it's unavoidable.
Heh, I used to assume int is 32bit, that broke AbiWord on
AMD64's.  So I released a new version using stdint.h, not it
broke builds on Solaris...

I should mention that Glib / Gtk+ / Pango headers are still quite
readble and useful with some real magic.  Compare that to glibc
headers that are a headache to figure out why that sincos symbol
is not being defined...

So, no, you are not alone about "caring for" head files, but
there are some reality checks that your approach do not pass
unfortunaly. :(

Regards,

--behdad