Re: Making Cairo backend mandatory for building?

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 05/09/2022 à 22:38, Jonas Hahnfeld a écrit :
> On Mon, 2022-09-05 at 22:27 +0200, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
> > Even though the Cairo backend is advertised as experimental, it is
> > starting to get some use; see for example the message today on -user
> > about a new OOoLilyPond release supporting it. This makes me wonder:
> > now that the official binaries have Cairo, isn't it time to require
> > it for the build and ditch --enable-cairo-backend so that everyone has
> > it, including those who use distro packages? To be clear, this wouldn't
> > be for 2.24, which is in build freeze mode, but we could do it in master
> > after branching.
> Sounds reasonable, would have proposed the same. Probably already
> having it for 2.25.0 makes sense so that it's there "from the
> beginning".



Agreed (of course).



> > We're going to do it sooner or later in the 2.25 series
> > anyway, as we eventually want Cairo to become the default.
> "eventually" yes, but not sure if during 2.25 (to be released as 2.26)
> is a good idea since moving away from the ps backend is quite a
> significant change (which I've argued before, would warrant a major
> version change aka 3.0).



I think that even if Cairo doesn't become the default for PDF
in 2.26, we will most probably want to make it the default for
SVG output, since the current SVG backend is slow and suffers
from rendering discrepancies.