The Cairo operating system

The Cairo operating system

Posted Jul 4, 2006 21:18 UTC (Tue) by jimmybgood (guest, #26142)
In reply to: The Cairo operating system by tetromino
Parent article: Cairo release 1.2.0 now available

Well, it turns out the Debian maintainers were more sensible than I gave them credit for and did compile cairo2-directfb as a separate package. The dependency on libdirectfb came from libcairo2-dev not libcairo2 itself. So libdirectfb0 is just useless cruft not the dangerous cruft it would be, were it to be actually linked to. And I tried directfb recently. It did such a number on my video card that I had to turn my machine off and unplug it from the wall to get the card to reset.

This could change at any time, though, and I bet within a year Debian will start requiring directfb for anyone who wants gtk+. They recently did this with SDL, prompting me to build my own packages without directfb support.

I don't object to any of cairo's possibilities. I'm concerned about the ability to make an informed choice. Right now I can choose to run GL screensavers or I can easily choose to turn them off if I'm working on something important and might walk away from the computer for more than 5 minutes. I can choose which daemons and cron jobs I want to run and which I don't. But, I don't see any mechanism in cairo that allows me to select which backends I wish to use and which I'd rather not.

Do I really have to have a reason that's approved by someone who starts their post by giving me an order?

BTW, is there a milestone for implementation of the libwoodburning3 backend or is that just a rumor started by some troll to poke fun at the Cairo project?

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