On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 05:09:27PM +0200, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
2014-10-15 16:34 GMT+02:00 Alex Valavanis <valavanisalex@...400...>:
Obviously, this would write off a lot of current Linux distro releases if we made it a hard dependency... but if we don't then I'm not sure we can really mark the downscaling issue as truly fixed.
The non-current distros will just have to use 0.48.
Yesterday I spoke with seb128 about including the newer cairo in Ubuntu 14.10 but looks like it missed the cut-off. So it's going to be at least another 6 months before the new cairo is available in a Ubuntu release.
Shall we bump the Cairo dependency to 1.14.0 in trunk then?
Yes, absolutely.
Actually, in thinking about this, I'm not sure upping the version requirement ends up helping users.
First, for Windows and OSX, most users are going to be using a pre-build anyway, and we control the cairo version there, so it's a non-issue.
For distros which *are* already including cairo 1.14, when the user obtains inkscape - whether manually built, from a ppa, or from the distro itself - it'll use the latest cairo already so forcing it in the config doesn't really matter here.
For distros which *aren't* already including cairo 1.14 (which is all of them at the moment), if the user wants to get Inkscape, this will force them to first upgrade cairo. But Cairo is a system-level library so upgrading it to a non-distro provided package introduces a lot of risk. Some users will shy from doing this; others will boldly do it and break their system. (I've seen printing mysteriously break, because I inadvertantly installed a cairo to /usr/local/lib that lacked pdf support, and evince decided to use that instead of system cairo.)
So, I think a lot more flexibility is placed in the user's hands if we *don't* force the dependency version. Downscaling is an important feature but one that perhaps not everyone requires.
Instead I think we should allow inkscape to install and run with either version of cairo, but message it on the download page that the newer version of cairo will fix the downscaling bug.
Bryce