Re: What backend should be the default now on -nix?

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi Banlu,

Banlu Kemiyatorn wrote:
> Please take a few minutes to vote.

don't you think we should exchange a few arguments on this before we 
start to vote? There are a few countries around were you may see the 
results of uninforemed voting :-)

Here my comments on the different backends:

cairo - great potential, when cairo itself is available everywhere, but 
at the moment does not display images properly and is to slow at the moment.

art - most functional complete of them all, but requires additional 
libraries and fonts.

xlib - works almost everywhere

xdps - currently unsupported

From that list I would say that xlib should be the default as it will 
run in all environments where any of the others will run. We could argue 
about the case, where we can proof inside of configure, that all the 
pre-requesits of art are fulfilled (e.g. all the libraries and fonts are 
there). In that case it would be fine for me to have art as the default. 
It wont help anybody to require loads of additional software just to get 
our backend running. Up to now the GNUstep approach was to use whatever 
is there and if something is missing rather leave out some functionality 
instead of not working at all.

Cheers
Fred