Re: Missing items to make Cairo ready

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

On Thu, 2022-12-29 at 01:53 +0100, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have just opened issues for the missing features of
> the Cairo backend that I am aware of.
> 
> https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/6500
> https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/6501
> https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/6502
> https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/6503
> https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/6504
> 
> Are there any others?

In my understanding (please correct me if I get this wrong), the
elephant in the room is that we _cannot_ support a number of features /
markup commands in Cairo, or at least a significant subset of how some
of them are used today: \epsfile and \postscript will only work with
Cairo if you produce a Postscript file, but not in the "default" modes
of outputting PDFs and PNGs.

> I ask this because we are at an early point in the
> 2.26 release cycle, which could potentially be ideal
> to get testing for "Cairo by default" if it were
> ready, but it isn't yet.

Because of the above, I think that there is nothing we can do in order
to make "Cairo by default" happen for the next stable release - we
first need to (in 2.26) properly deprecate everything we cannot / do
not want to support with Cairo. Then they can be removed and Cairo be
made the default backend in LilyPond 3.0, which, in my understanding,
is a major major change in how LilyPond has created output since its
very beginning.
For that reason, I'm not fond of opt-out testing Cairo any time soon.

Jonas

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part