[cairo] XCB backend : stable for 1.10 ?

[Chris Wilson]

On Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:31:54 +0100, Frederic Crozat <fcrozat at mandriva.com> wrote:
> I've got some request on Mandriva cooker about enabling XCB backend in 
> our cairo package and I'm a bit reluctant (even if our SUSE and Ubuntu 
> friends enabled it), since it is not considered stable and because it 
> would pull "hard" dependency on any software linked to cairo (since 
> cairo backends aren't plugins.
> 
> Is there any plan regarding API stability for XCB backend for Cairo 1.10 ?

It's even worse than you might have feared... My suggestion is that we use
the XCB backend as the preferred X11 backend in 1.10 (so long as XCB is
available at configure time). The rationale being that cairo-xlib has some
thread-safety issues that can be simply resolved in conjunction with
switching to cairo-xcb. The issue with pulling in extra dependencies is
moot as libX11 now also depends upon libxcb, with the only extra, slightly
unusual, one being libX11-xcb so that we can continue supporting
cairo-xlib on top of cairo-xcb.
-- 
Chris Wilson, Intel Open Source Technology Centre