El vie, 17-10-2014 a las 16:42 +0200, Krzysztof Kosiński escribió:
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).
I'd be fine with that, if you think that would make for a fair compromise.
I understand where you're coming from, that you want to ensure users don't have an embarrassingly poor experience with this new Inkscape release. A lot of work has gone into it and you want to make sure it's seen in its best light. I feel the same way.
I thought about this a little more and I think I was initially far too fundamentalist. I would be OK with simply giving the users some clear indication how to fix the display of raster images (e.g. display a dialog box that directs them to a wiki page with instructions on how to install new Cairo).
As the user who reported the bug being discussed, I'd like to add that for my workflow (and I'm sure that many people's workflows too) including bitmap images in vector illustrations is a critical feature. Removing the ability to work with bitmaps is a no-go. If I install Inkscape from the repositories and find that I would immediatelly roll back to the previous version. People getting a program from repository expects that the program works. Period. Getting instructions to make the missing feature work (which is a moving target, because different distros and different platforms have different ways to achieve it) is not good for users and it's a burden for whoever has to mantain that wiki page with updated information about how to make the thing work on every platform.
I'm not afraid of compiling stuff myself (actually I have been compiling inkscape and cairo master) but I always relied upon the stable version from the repositories for my production work. The version from the repositories has to just work, and if that means making the newer cairo a hard dependency and staying with the old one until the distro gets the new cairo, that's fine.
That means that no user will find that the last stable version breaks for something that is crucial to their workflow. That's a really nasty surprise when you have a lot of work to do.
The consequences of bumping the cairo version as a hard dependency will be that somebody does a PPA for Ubuntu or people who prefer to compile will have to do some extra work. And for the latter, a wiki page explaining how to do it would be fine (I've done it, it's not difficult and relatively safe if you compile using a custom prefix). People who compile their own stuff are used to reading documentation. People who get the programs from repositories or installers just expect that the program will work.
Gez.