Re: require cairo?

[Ben Pfaff]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 2:08 AM John Darrington
<john@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 10:31:36PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>      Actually the build is already broken without cairo, because the figures
>      for the documentation fail to build.
>
> When you say the "figures" are you talking about the images or the examples?

I am talking about the .png files built from the examples in the manual.

> The examples should not require cairo so far as I'm aware (however that
> might change if we have examples with graphs in them).

The build system builds .png files so that the output in the Info version
of the manual can look nice, where available.

> In general,  I'm inclined to agree, that the --without-cairo flag
> probably brings more cost than benefit.
>
> Checking that everything builds with all combination of flags becomes
> rapidly intractable.  Testing N configure flags, requires having 2^N
> nightly builds ...

Yes. And I think that most users will want pretty output. If they want
the GUI, it's required anyhow.