On 2007-February-26 , at 04:26 , Michael Wybrow wrote:
On Sun, 25 Feb 2007, jiho wrote:
On 2007-February-25 , at 17:10 , bulia byak wrote:
And it so happens that the fixed order of cairo coincides with the hardware order on PC but not on Mac. Hence, painting by cairo directly into Inkscape/GDK buffers worked on PC but on Mac, all colors are wrong and (in case of outline) black color gets zero opacity, i.e. becomes invisible.
Is this a problem in the hardware in terms of the physical pieces in the computer or in the way the hardware is handled by the system, deeply inside? I don't know if this is relevant but then, is there a difference between PowerPC and Intel based Macs (I am on a PPC)?
Hardware. PPC is big-endian, i386 is little-endian. So yes, the Intel based Macs are little-endian, just like normal PCs and the new cairo outline code works fine.
So the future looks indeed brighter! Are there other big-endian machines out there which could be problematic? Unless there is a concern with the fact that hardware order and fixed order are coinciding *by chance alone* on little-endian machines, work may continue as planned while keeping the old code inside ifdefs and having a configure option for big-endian machines for a little while (or even an automatic switch turned on when configure detects that the machine is big-endian). Indeed, PPC machines will probably disappear quite fast, the Mac community being usually a early- adopting one. For example, many software makers already announce that the next version of their software will only run on version 10.5 of the OS (the next version to come) which is a paid upgrade from 10.4 and will be out only one year after 10.4... and no one seems to have concerns with this (well, appart from me that is ;-) ). Therefore Inkscape won't be too much of a bad guy if versions 0.45 or 0.46 were the last to be PPC compatible. Plus, I think I am the only one here left with a PPC machine and will probably ditch it soon for a new i386 one. Whatever I do, I will have less and less time over the next 6 months (because of the end of my PhD). Hence, unless someone else compiles svn snapshots with a PPC machine, any new code probably won't have much testing on this platform (while keeping old code there will be less of a problem).
Just my humble opinion on a matter that overwhelms me...
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/