[cworth.org] / src / gtk+ / hackfest_2008_03_11.mdwn

[[meta title="GTK+ Hackfest day #2"]]

[[tag gtk conferences]]

I have the opportunity to be attending a [GTK+
Hackfest](http://live.gnome.org/GTK+/Hackfest2008) in Berlin this
week. Visiting Berlin, (and sleeping about a block away from
Checkpoint Charlie), is quite interesting, and a welcome new
experience for me.

I promised some people back home that I would post daily updates on
things that get discussed/decided here. The hackfest could only
support a couple dozen people, but certainly there's a larger audience
interested in the things happening here. And it would be a shame to
not share things with that larger audience.

So far I've done a very poor job of actually getting those updates
out. One snag was that due to some interaction of bugs in ikiwiki
and/or planet, planet.gnome.org decided to post ancient posts of mine
instead of recent ones. I still haven't worked out those bugs
completely. In the meantime, I'm glad that some people that missed it
the first time enjoyed my writeup on learning git. And for anyone
wondering about my son Scott, it's been over 6 months since his first
steps, and he's now walking, running, and doing everything else
expected of a 2-year-old. Anyone who met him for the first time now
would never know that he ever had any problem. So that's wonderful.

But getting back to the hackfest: Due to my travel schedule I missed
the first day completely. I know that some transitioning-to-GTK+-3.0
plans were discussed then, and hopefully people have seen those
slides. There was also a lot of talk about adding introspection to
GTK+, (to enable automatic language bindings and other fancy
things). The introspection discussion has continued over the second
and third days, and hopefully it's going just great, (but I haven't
been a part of it at all---somehow it's just one of those topics that
makes my brain switch off---but I'm glad other people are interested
in solving the issues).

So what I did do on Tuesday included a fantastic presentation from
Behdad Esfahbod about the proposed "user font" API for cairo. This is
something that's had some preliminary patches since 2006 when Kristian
Høgsberg first needed this for supporting fonts embedded in PDF
files. The discussion here took great advantage of having all the
right people together at the same time, (though it would have been
great to have Kristian here as well). We had an implementor (Behdad),
a maintainer (myself), and two consumers of the API, (Benjamin
"Company" Otte of [swfdec](http://swfdec.freedesktop.org) fame and Alp
Toker of [WebKit/GTK+](http://live.gnome.org/WebKitGtk). That was a
great group to have together to make sure we the API would make
everybody happy. We found several changes that will improve the API
quite a bit, but also shouldn't be too much work. Behdad plans to have
the changes all committed to cairo, (on a new 1.7 development branch),
before the end of the week.

Afterwards, Behdad returned my code-review favor by taking a look at
the patch series I have for adding support for arbitrary true-color
visuals to cairo. This series is to address a
[number](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7735) of fatal
[bugs](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9719) that occur
when targeting X servers that don't have the Render extension, (Xvnc
is a common case). I knew my patch series had some ugly bits in it,
but I wasn't sure what the cleanest fix would be. Behdad set me
straight right away. So I'll be landing this in cairo very shortly,
and this is one of the very last issues left unfinished on the [cairo
1.6 roadmap](http://cairographics.org/roadmap/).

The only other unfinished feature on the roadmap is support for
pseudo-color visuals, but Behdad is trying to convince me to let that
slip, (it's a lot of work for fairly small gain). Who would be really
hurt to see this feature slip again? Let me know if you are, (and I'll
let you know how you can help make it happen too).