State of gdk-pixbuf

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Hey,

I've spent a couple of days triaging all the gdk-pixbuf bugs, wrangling
patches, and testing what was testable. The bugs left over basically
fall in a few categories:
- Bugs or feature requests in the loaders. There's quite a few of them
that could probably be handled in minutes, or maybe in a couple of hours
if one doesn't know a particular format. It would be great to have an
OPW or GSoC project based on those.
- API additions. A few of those for animation features which we might or
might not want to support, quite a few for async versions of existing
functions, or variants of existing functions (stream-based loading).
- GDI loader bugs
- Pixops bugs (Argh [1])
- Handling of huge images
- Cairo interaction support

The last 3 are related in that GdkPixbuf is a format that doesn't lend
itself to handling big images (especially black and white pictures would
balloon in memory usage), and that its coverage for acceleration in
manipulation and compositing is small (basically unaccelerated on
anything but 32-bit x86 and Solaris).

I think we need to start looking at a replacement for pixops, and a
replacement for the GdkPixbuf format.

I'm particularly interested to know what cairo, pixman and other image
manipulation libraries can do for us. Benjamin surely has comments[2] :)

Cheers

PS: Now is a good time to look at your pet feature, dig in a little, and
get your patches reviewed.

[1]: 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=gdk-pixbuf&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&component=pixops
[2]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491507#c13