The Cairo operating system
Posted Jul 5, 2006 16:58 UTC (Wed) by
jimmybgood (guest, #26142)
In reply to:
The Cairo operating system by farnz
Parent article:
Cairo release 1.2.0 now available
> You seem to advocate changing everything at runtime or startup time; why can't I choose a different VM at startup time? Why can't Firefox drop the XUL handler, if I only need a HTML renderer without a UI? Why can't GIMP run without GTK+, if I'm only using it from the command line? If I'm not planning to use text, why does GIMP pull in FreeType and Pango?
Those possibilities are very appealing. It probably would sacrifice some performance for people who have powerful computers and want all the features anyway. But it would make it much easier for less-advantaged people the world around to install reduced feature set software on legacy computers.
Cairo is not like a new RSS aggregator that we can just delete from our computer, if we feel uncomortable with it. Gtk2 is central to the desktop. I think it's reasonable to ask the developers to consider the needs of all users, not just the power users and to anticipate the potential misuses and abuses of package managers and application writers.
On the other hand, it's still possible to have a desktop without the bloated, insecure monstrosities that QT and now GTK2 have become.
I see several comments that say to the effect, X and OpenGl do something so it's OK that Cairo does it. Let me repeat, it's easy to keep OpenGL on a tight leash and turn it off completely. As for X, it's a very old application that was written in a different era. If experienced developers were to rewrite it from scratch, if they wanted to they could make it much more controllable, stable and secure.
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