Re: Cairo plans

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Am Dienstag, dem 31.08.2021 um 17:24 +0200 schrieb Jean Abou Samra:
> To me, the top priority would be getting the fresh
> Cairo backend to be tested as widely as possible, as
> soon as possible. Unfortunately, I currently have some
> doubt that releases with Cairo being opt-in will best
> achieve this effect. The reason is that most users
> are editing in Frescobaldi, and Frescobaldi doesn't
> -- to my knowledge -- offer a way of permanently editing
> the set of command line options passed to LilyPond
> (there is "Engrave (custom)" but you have to click
> OK in a new window every time, which is annoying when
> working on a score). It would be best to get some users
> to use Cairo for their daily engraving work, as opposed
> to letting them test a few scores when the release is
> out (e.g., it took me a couple months of building with Guile 2
> and developing with it to notice the \ottava quirk in
> https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/6141).
> For that I think Cairo by default would be the most
> effective way. Hence my earlier suggestion of making
> Cairo the default in the next development release.
> These are called unstable after all.

I fully agree, except for the combination of "as widely as possible"
and "as soon as possible". To reiterate, I propose to include it opt-in
for the next stable release, and then switch early in the development
cycle leading to a potential 3.0.
On the other hand, I think we should definitely avoid going to Cairo by
default now and then switch back before doing a stable release due to
whatever reasons. In my humble opinion, that's a very good recipe for
breakage, and predicting that no such reasons will occur is pure
gambling.


Jonas

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