Re: gtk+2.8.x and cairo

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 14:26 -0500, Kurt Miller wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> There is a rather significant cairo bug that can cause all gtk+2 based 
> apps to sefault upon startup in some X server setups. The problem can 
> be seen across archs (sparc/sparc64/macppc/i386) and OS's and seems to 
> be easist to reproduce when the X server is at Depth 8. 
> 
> I know this is a cairo bug, but it effects all gtk+2.8.x based 
> applications when a machine happens to be configured such that the bug 
> it hit. In some cases it is not possible to configure the X server to 
> avoid the bug, so it makes all gtk+2 apps not useable.
> 
> I'm writing this list in an attempt to raise awareness of the bug.
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4505

I'd basically consider GTK+-2.8 to require something better than 8pp;
I know there are people who love to get new software running on
ancient hardware, but PseudoColor really is a different and complex
world. Getting PseudoColor support working reasonably was one of the
most time-consuming parts of GTK+-0.9x development.

(And the CPU that goes along with that vintage of hardware is going
to perform pretty badly for Cairo ...)

That being said, it really shouldn't segfault; but it's not something
within what the scope of the Cairo developers test on or can support
themselves. If you catch up with Keith Packard on #cairo, I think he
had some ideas about how PseudoColor could be supported in cairo
without causing excessive complexity to leak into the normal code.

If the issue is 8/24 hardware defaulting to 8bpp, then it might make
sense to have some environment variable or XSetting to make the GTK+
default visual the GdkRGB visual rather than the system visual.

Regards,
					Owen