Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 11, 2006 22:25 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (subscriber, #774)
In reply to: Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal) by bk
Parent article: Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal)

Cairo depends on quite a few libraries, the most annoying being the X11 stuff. Obviously, this makes it unusable in the [web]server deployments. Same problem as of imlib, libMagic, etc.

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Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 12, 2006 11:47 UTC (Thu) by dcoutts (subscriber, #5387) [Link]

No, X11 is merely one of the many cairo backends. You can build it with just the PNG backend.

It doesn't depend on much else in fact, just fontconfig, freetype & zlib. In other words it has the same deps as gd (when gd is built with optional truetype and png support). It should be perfectly suitable for use on a web server.

Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 12, 2006 13:26 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

> No, X11 is merely one of the many cairo backends.

I guess you're right. But all Linux distros ship it with the X11 backend, so you have no straightforward choice. Hopefully, they'll learn to make it as an optional loadable module.

Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 15, 2006 16:18 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

Gentoo is perfectly capable of building Cairo without the X backend.

Creating/Manipulating Images with gd (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 15, 2006 20:04 UTC (Sun) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

... with the obvious result that most of the apps currently using Cairo [for drawing on X] stop working. All backends must be optional, but not at the compile time - at the run time.