Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 14:32 -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On May 5, 2008, at 1:33 PM, Peter Clifton wrote:
> >>> IMO, using yet another external library is not worth the inevitable
> >>> support headache just to get some pretty fonts.
> >
> > It is getting quite frustrating to keep coding for the lowest common
> > denominator, and I'm sure there are many win32 / UNIX boxes out there
> > which have very few of our dependant libraries installed by default.
> 
>    Well, the other end of that stick is making gEDA a Linux-only (and  
> "recent" Linux at that) product.  I'd not be in favor of that at  
> all.  There's got to be a happy medium in there somewhere.

The suggested libraries are portable across UNIX variants and even win32
(ok, dbus is poor on win32). Admittedly, as Dan will account, cairo's
sparc support has been poor, they only just added code to support
pseudocolor visuals.

I would hate to see gEDA become Linux only, sometimes its easy to forget
that on other UNIX systems, the libraries I take for granted as part of
my platform (pulled in by GNOME, KDE etc..) all have to be built if you
are building on a different architecture.

Coming to the "recent" aspect, there must come a point where new
functionality can only be targeted towards newer machines, or by
including new libraries. In reality, I don't think this is going to be a
big problem, since the pace of development is relatively slow. If it
really became necessary, we could probably choose to maintain an older
version (e.g. 1.6.0), for longer than we might ordinarily.

I've already agreed with Ales that the Cairo code should not replace
the GDK code, instead be something which can be selected at build time
for now. The fact that text rendering code may rely on using yet
unreleased features in cairo only confirms that it must be an "optional
extra", and won't be ready in the short-term future.

If we don't develop now, and in pace with cairo etc.. we don't get the
chance to beta-test their functionality and feedback what our needs will
be, we'd just be in a position to use / not use it depending on how it
ended up. I'm in contact with the person developing the "userfont" API,
and whilst I'm still more a newb asking for help, I'm hopeful that this
will ensure the new API is complete enough to suits our future needs.

> > What platform is this - does it have any way you could get a
> > pre-compiled version?
> 
>    Solaris10 on UltraSPARC, and MacOS X on PPC.  I prefer to build  
> from unmodified sources...I eschew "package management" systems  
> because they put stuff in weird places and are almost never current.

Does gEDA give much more grief than other apps? (Have you tried
openoffic / mozilla?). Not that I'm saying I would like gEDA to be the
sort of code which takes solid days of compiling ;), I'm just trying to
understand how other packages compare. Do you run any Gnome apps?

BTW.. I can appreciate some of this pain, having cross compiled gEDA
from scratch on a platform without any libraries.... I downloaded
various pre-built bits like GTK, pango etc.. but had to re-build myself
in the end.

As Stuart says, I think the binary installer is the way forward for
non-distro, non-hacker installations.

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)



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