[news.eclipse.platform.swt] Re: cairo no longer shipped with 3.2M3?

[Billy Biggs <bbiggs@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jason Grant wrote:
> It was nice that eclipse 3.1 shipped with a pre-built libcairo version
> that matched SWT's needs.  Eclipse 3.2M3 doesn't ship with this library. 
>
> Does the absence of the bundled library suggest that libcairo will no
> longer will be supplied with eclipse?  (I realise that this is only a
> temporary measure until libcairo is included with the major linux
> distros, but this still seems to be some way off).  I'm keen for eclipse
> to continue to ship with the libs, since it will make installation of my
> RCP product much simpler.

  Please watch this bug:

    http://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=110924

  Shipping a dependency is a tricky thing to do, since you're doomed to
be behind what modern distributions ship, it increases the size of the
download, and you're vulnerable to bugs.  However, you're correct that
cairo isn't yet in the major distributions (it's in SuSE 10 and the
latest from Ubuntu, but won't appear until FC5, etc).

  What we're experimenting with now is giving the ability to include
a "libcairo-swt.so" alongside the SWT JNI libraries, and only load this
if we can't find a suitable version of cairo already installed on the
system.  This code should appear in 3.2M4, and hopefully we can ship
with it a pre-built cairo 1.0.

> For the benefit of others, I found the following rpms were required to
> support advanced graphics under fedora core 4:
>
>  cairo-1.0.2-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm 
>  glitz-0.4.3-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
>  libpixman-0.1.5-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm

  Note that cairo 1.0.2 includes libpixman (really, we stopped
distributing a separate libpixman and put the code in cairo proper),
and glitz isn't used by cairo/GTK+ so you don't need that either.

  -Billy