why is cairo with pdf and postscript backend mandatory?

[nazgul33 <nazgul33 gmail com>]

Hi all,

I'm trying to run recent GTK+ on my mips dev platform with just 64M ram.
I could compile needed libraries successfully such as 

libiconv-1.12
gettext-0.16.1
glib-2.19.8
atk-1.25.2
libxml2-2.7.3
fontconfig-2.6.0
cairo-1.8.6
pixman-0.14.0
libpng
freetype
iconv
gettext
directfb ( with chip-specific driver, of course )

with a little "pain in the ass" problems.

Because my platform has insufficient RAM, I don't want to add all the fancy features of GTK+.
I found that the ps and pdf backends are needed for high quality printing, after a short googling.
But I don't plan to print anything on the platform, I thinks those things are just a waste of valuable resources.

Why pdf/ps backends are mandatory?
Does anybody know which version of GTK+ source distribution has no such restriction?
What can I do to remove the restriction if i have to you recent GTK+?

Thanks,

Steven.