[cairo] bug 4945: six months to fix a bug ?

[Marc Espie]

Hi,

I'm not really very interested in cairo, rather in the state of
OpenBSD in general.

A loooong time ago, we've had some big issue integrating cairo,
namely the lack of support for non XRENDER 8 bits display.

Thanks to the great work of Eric Faurot, we've had a working patch
in our tree since March 2006. That's almost a year now.

As a policy, we do not like to keep patches around, especially when
they're not OpenBSD-specific... While looking at a cairo update, I
noticed this patch, which is complicated code, is still needed.

I looked at the bug-reports upstream, in the cairo database. 
This is bug 4945.

There is a large discussion, a lot of work from Eric, first with the
first patch, and now with the updated version.

I also couldn't fail noticing all the extra bugs linked to this one,
marked as duplicate, with various setups which show that 8 bit display
without XRENDER are still quite alive and kicking.

So, now I am wondering. Why is this bug-report still open, and not some
form of this patch integrated ?

>From what I understand, it looks like the cairo developers do not like
this patch too much, but hey, it does the job doesn't it ? In my world,
when you run into a bug-fix for an actual problem, you either integrate
it, or you provide a better fix. In a timely manner. I do not consider
9 months to be `timely'.

You could also tell me to piss off, that 8 bits display without XRENDER
are a thing of the past... unfortunately, some major players are now
using cairo, it's a piece of the puzzle needed to compile recent gtk+
stuff, and lots and lots of applications (I just ran into graphviz 2.12,
which *requires* a recent cairo to have any kind of non-tcl based gfx
interface).

I know, playing with newer displays is fun, and `this is a free software
project, so no strings attached', yada yada yada.

But seriously. You've got a major bug, a serviceable patch, and everybody
is sitting on their thumbs waiting for someone to fix the issue in a
cleaner way ? 9 months!!! this won't happen. 

Meanwhile, people like Eric have to fix the patch periodically so it still
applies to cairo -current.   Other people run into the bug. Vendors from
various distributions all duplicate the patch from Eric.  This looks like
an irresponsible waste of people's time to me.

Integrate the darn patch already.