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+[[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).
projects / cworth.org / commitdiff