Re: Sawfish building patch

[Sander Vesik <sv117949 ireland sun com>]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, John Harper wrote:

> Federico Mena Quintero writes:
> |> Imlib still works better for sawfish than gdk-pixbuf does, so I don't
> |> want to remove the possibility of using it
> |
> |Why is this?  I'd like to fix any shortcomings in GdkPixbuf that make it
> |less preferable than Imlib.
> 
> It's a combination of things:
> 
> 1. Imlib was specifically designed to handle images for a window
> manager, so it works pretty well for that.
> 
> The most obvious example is that it supports scaling images with an
> unscaled border region. Gdk-pixbuf doesn't, so sawfish has to do that
> by hand, and it's slowish (and possibly buggy in some corner cases)
> 
> 2. I think Imlib uses less memory than the gdk-pixbuf+GdkRGB
> combination (GdkRGB allocates huge buffers on startup that account for
> a large percentage of sawfish's memory use)
> 

sawfish memory use - even with quite complex themes - is quite modest, as
a matter af fact, it is one of the most modest memory consumers in gnome2.

For example:

		  total	  resident shared  private
sawfish:	   9784    6752    3584    3168
gnome-calculator: 19968   14224    8600    5624

other, more complex gnome2 programs take even more memory.

> 3. There are some bugs that only appear when sawfish uses gdk-pixbuf,
> e.g. doing partial exposes of window border regions seems not to work
> sometimes (this is probably a sawfish bug)
> 
> And I think there were some other really strange bugs that appeared
> when Mandrake (?) starting compiling sawfish with gdk-pixbuf (they gave
> up and resorted to Imlib. Again this is probably something in sawfish
> that should be fixed, maybe to do with X errors)
> 

Does it occur with both gdk-pixbuf1 and gdk-pixbuf2? How does one visualy
detect the bug?

> So in summary, it would be good to fix the gdk-pixbuf bugs in sawfish,
> but until then I don't recommend people compile sawfish with it (though
> I use it that way everyday, without any observed problems apart from
> the exposure problem mentioned above)
> 

I think its quite likely (or rather, I would be really suprised if it
wasn't the case) Sun will ship a gdk-pixbuf sawfish with gnome2. For a
start, its one less library to support. This will add some amounts of
evolutionary pressure to the gdk-pixbuf bugs.

>
> 	John
> 

	Sander

	I see a dark sail on the horizon
	Set under a dark cloud that hides the sun
	Bring me my Broadsword and clear understanding