On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 10:40:01PM +0200, Alex Valavanis wrote:

I'd be very reluctant to see cairo & pixman brought in tree. My experience with "unforking" GDL suggest that this could cause major maintenance headaches down the line. I think that something like the following approach would be a nicer solution:

== develpment/testing ==

1. Bump dependency versions in configure.ac etc to the required

(unstable) versions of Cairo/pixman. Mark bugs as "Fix committed" 2. Create a devlibs branch with a suitable (unstable) Cairo/pixman versions 3. Create a dependency on a daily build of Cairo/pixman in the PPA

...it's then up to individual developers to install their own unstable development libs rather than it being our problem to keep it in trunk. Early adopters and beta testers will be able to continue using the PPA without having to compile from source (or know/understand what has changed).

== pre-release ==

4. Wait for suitable *stable* versions of Cairo/pixman to be released
5. Bump devlibs trunk versions of libraries
6. Kill the unstable devlibs fork
7. Bump PPA Build-Depends version in debian/control and drop

dependency on daily Cairo builds 8. Test thoroughly

In any case, I don't think we should go ahead with the 0.49 release until all the dependencies are stable. If that means a longer wait, I'm fine with that!

For Ubuntu users, PPAs seem to be a commonly used solution to this type of problem. This would be straightforward to implement and I shouldn't think it would cause that much surprise to users. For non-technical users I can see how the process might be a bit inconvenient; is that what folks are worried about? If we're really just concerned here with developers being able to build Inkscape on 12.04, I'm sure they could handle installing junk from a PPA.

Another option is to get the dependencies added through backports. As a general rule they never backport libraries, so this seems like a non-option for cairo / pixman, however it might be worth checking into if people feel the PPA solution is insufficient. Pixman and Cairo are both well maintained, so you never no. I've seen crazier things accepted.

If the need for newer cairo/pixman is narrow enough (i.e. just the downscaling fix), rather than put the libs in-tree, what about just adding an autoconf check for the cairo version, and then just #ifdef the appropriate code, so inkscape will build and work with old cairo/pixman (with the bug) as well as newer cairo/pixman (with the fix). This seems like it would give the most flexibility for everyone, without being terribly messy. Carrying an #ifdef to 2017 might be more palatable than two entire source trees...

Bryce