On Wed, 6 Dec 2006 12:57:57 -0800, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> wrote:
A few weeks back we decided to put the release on pause to give time for additional work on the PDF extension. Could someone outline the status of this work, and if it is still necessary for this to be blocking the release?
At this point it looks like the most major issues I care about have been addressed on the Inkscape side -- I think it's making all the right cairo calls for what it needs to export at this point. The problem is that cairo still isn't up to snuff.
Aaron Spike (and to a much lesser extent myself) have been working the cairo end of things, but Carl may still be the best person to give an estimate of how much more work is stil required. One of the most important things is getting push_group working right in Cairo-PDF -- right now it flat out rasterizes them, rather than creating PDF transparency groups with vectors.
If not, would anyone have an issue if we resumed the release process at this point? I find myself with some unexpected extra freetime this month that I could devote to assisting with the release.
In principle I think we could probably go ahead, since now that things are (mostly) fixed up on our side, the PDF export will get better as cairo gets better -- for Windows and autopackage at least, we could ship updates with updated cairo libs.
The problem is that with current cairo, the result (while better in some important ways) is really broken in others, so on balance it's about as bad as the PDF export we shipped with 0.44 (which was so bad that it [almost?] wasn't worth shipping IMO). And we're likely to be stuck with current cairo on most Linux distros for a while.
-mental