[cairo] insufficiency of gdkcairo

[Jason Dorje Short]

Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
> Owen can probably reply more authoratitively, but AFAIK it's not
> possible to fix this without breaking backwards compatability with GTK
> 2; this will probably only be possible with a backwards compat break
> with GTK 3.  The problem is that many gtk programs assume things about
> the underlying implementation; that is, they use native X calls when
> running under X11, and assume that they can pull out a Drawable/Pixmap
> from a GdkPixmap, etc.   I'm pretty sure that the gtk folks want to
> get to a mostly-cairo world for any drawing... but it's not possible
> to do so right now, so it's happening in incremental steps.

I imagine fixing the design would break compatability in that way, yes. 
  But for a workaround all that's needed is to provide a parallel API 
that supports cairo_surface_t just like the one that supports GdkPixbuf.

-jason