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The Cairo operating system

The Cairo operating system

Posted Jul 7, 2006 20:01 UTC (Fri) by evgeny (guest, #774)
In reply to: The Cairo operating system by oak
Parent article: Cairo release 1.2.0 now available

Fine, but this still doesn't explain why you insist on closing the first _backend_? What you describe is switching from an _instance_ of a device to an instance of another device. Say, the X11 device, once registered, could allow you to have several Drawables (Pixmap/Window) in the same app - e.g., one for the main window, another one for File/Open... preview, etc, which doesn't mean the X11 device plugin should be registered/unregistered each time. Just as the dynamic loader does symbol resolving only once, similarly, all available/enabled backend plugins need to be initiated only once.


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The Cairo operating system

Posted Jul 7, 2006 20:24 UTC (Fri) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

> Fine, but this still doesn't explain why you insist on closing
> the first _backend_?

I did not say any such thing. :-)
I was merely commenting on the pros&cons of dlopen() and dlclose().
Whether some piece of code actually uses them, is up to the code...


> Say, the X11 device, once registered, could allow you to have several
> Drawables (Pixmap/Window) in the same app - e.g., one for the main
> window, another one for File/Open...

Note that those are different windows. (X) display migration means
moving all of applications (open) windows from one (e.g. local) X server
to another X server. For example you take a PDA with you to a meeting
and you want to show something you've scribbled with it briefly on the
projector before continuing using the same program. Or you have in your
desktop machine multiple graphics cards each running a separate X server
and you want to migrate some of your apps from one X server to another
*without closing* the apps.

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