This debate also raises the spectre of the old "Gtk+ 3" debate again... any system with Cairo 1.14 will also certainly have Gtk+ >= 3.2 available. Last time the issue was raised of switching to Gtk3 by default for inkscape >= 0.92, it was noted that it would write off users of LTS distros like RHEL, CentOS etc. If we set a hard Cairo >= 1.14 dependency, it will effectively do the same thing.
I think we really need a policy statement from the board about support periods... it's a major maintenance headache if we're aiming to support Inkscape on everything from RHEL 5 (stable release from 2007-2017) to distros like Arch Linux that pull in bleeding edge libraries. By the end of an RHEL support cycle, that would mean that we'd be supporting builds using a ten-year range of infrastructure. We already have literally hundreds off conditional build statements, and each of these represents a hazard... so something has to give somewhere!
How about something like this...
0.48.x: Continue to support as an Inkscape LTS release for another couple of years, but cap the API versions we'll support so we don't have to keep releasing a new 0.48.x whenever the private Poppler headers change! Security issues and simple/serious bug fixes only. 0.91: Set Cairo >= 1.14 dependency; release as scheduled... no backports to old distros. 0.92: Enable Gtk+ 3 by default (Gtk+ 2 kept as fallback) 0.93: Remove Gtk+ 2 support and GDL fork; migrate to upstream libcroco
AV
On 16 October 2014 13:48, Krzysztof Kosiński <tweenk.pl@...400...> wrote:
2014-10-16 8:11 GMT+02:00 Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...>:
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.
This 'flexibility' only allows the user to obtain a version of Inkscape which has a very high severity bug, and moreover one which is only apparent after you did all the work and are stuck with a completely useless render. It makes working with photos impossible.
If we want to make a version of Inkscape 0.91 that works with Cairo < 1.14, then we should simply disable the display of raster images (e.g. replace every image with a placeholder that says "you version of Cairo is too old, please upgrade", like we do for missing images).
Regards, Krzysztof