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

[Riccardo]

Hello,

On Sunday, October 24, 2004, at 07:22 PM, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> 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.
very experimental.

> art - most functional complete of them all, but requires additional 
> libraries and fonts.
good for eye-candy, anti-alias. I would say preferred backend for 
demo-cd's and so. Few fonts. Has the advantage of using the original's 
host fonts when exporting display (well it can be an advantage/drawback 
depending on what you do). Has potential Shm problems and is on some 
computers slower than xlib. exports worse (but works with shm disabled) 
than xlib.

> xlib - works almost everywhere
fast on many systems. portable. little dependencies. exports 
excellently. has excellent non-aa fonts on system that have them (quite 
usual). I like it (ok, ok, that's  not a big argument)
But it is plagued by bugs! The font panel on most of my systems is 
screwed up, showing fonts badlzy, not recognizing them all and 
displaying a "Nil" font...
I was told that some image operations are also unsupported... and it is 
little unmaintained.

It does not dither on 8bit displays. I don't know if this could be 
implemented or not...

> xdps - currently unsupported
would be morally nice.. think about original NeXT... On systems with dps 
(irix, solaris... openstep...) it would give excellent font speed, 
incredible operations on objects, colors, fonts, rotations, scalings... 
and excellent dithering.
Most of the systems with dps are not supported by gnustep currently :)
Also I don't know if there is a ocmparable "ghostscript" equivalent.

> 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.

I quite agree.

-R