[cairo] Re: Flag for FP-challenged platforms

[Daniel Amelang]

On 11/29/06, Dominic Lachowicz <domlachowicz at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Oh, yuck, now I'll complain. ;-)
> >
> > I was fine to let --avoid-floating-point go by without comment but
> > --enable-avoid-floating-point is a pretty awkward phrase, (sounds to
> > me like "turning on the turn-it-off switch" ).
>
> It should be pretty trivial to change this to an
> AC_ARG_ENABLE(floating-point, ...) where the default value is 'yes' or
> 'auto', which means 'yes'. Then, someone who doesn't want it can do:
>
> --disable-floating-point

Well, that's where I started, and perhaps where I should go back to,
but I'll tell you what issues I had with this:

It's false advertising. We don't disable floating point. We just avoid
it in a couple places. 99% of the floating point code is still
executed. So if we had this, I can just see someone coming back and
complaining that their cairo library still has floating point
instructions all over the place, so the flag must be broken, etc.

Or worse, word gets around that cairo has a --disable-floating-point
option now. "Yay! I knew they would come to their senses and create
that fixed-point API we've been pushing so hard." ;)

Dan