[GRASS-dev] 7.x Status Update

[William Kyngesburye]

On Aug 10, 2008, at 4:50 AM, Glynn Clements wrote:

> Glynn Clements wrote:
>
>> Another potentially disruptive update: the raster library now uses
>> floating point values for coordinates.
>
> Next update: the cairo driver is now the default, assuming that GRASS
> was built --with-cairo. If you haven't been enabling this, now is the
> time to try, as the PNG driver may not be around for much longer.

I guess I *really* need to figure out Cairo for OSX now ;)  Well,  
here's my current status as of a month ago:

- pixman: requires GCC 4.2 for SSE2 (for some stack alignment issue),  
but compiles OK without it.  I need to try the new GCC 4.2 available  
in Xcode 3.1 (this is available on OSX 10.5 Leopard only).

I made a script to build pixman universal, and will put it on my site  
when I figure out the SSE2 stuff.

- cairo: requires pkg-config to configure.  For OSX this is silly, so  
I hacked configure to disable pkg-config usage.

BUT, GRASS also uses pkg-config to get cairo config info (the only dep  
in GRASS that does this).  I find this unreasonable (at least for  
OSX), so can we get alternative (and standard for GRASS) --with-cairo- 
includes and --with-cairo-libs flags, please?

- Cairo knows about OSX Intel for configuring endian stuff, but my  
notes say there is a problem with that on PPC.  I need to look at it  
again.

> At present, it uses the "toy" font backend, which means that it only
> understands a limited set of fonts (AFAICT, it understands mono, serif
> and sans, and -bold and -italic variants), although support for
> FreeType and stroke fonts will be added soon.

- cairo also requires fontconfig to be used with freetype.  GRASS is  
handling font paths and configuration itself, so I don't see the point  
of this.  I built fonconfig for my old library binaries once, but it  
was never used in the GIS packages and there were some build problems  
(I forget what), so I removed it.  OSX X11 has fontconfig (and  
freetype), but I don't want to depend on an X11 installation on OSX.

So, I'm disabling the freetype backend and looking at the Cairo quartz  
font backend.  I don't know how GRASS passes font details to Cairo, so  
I don't know if this will work.  In general, how do you specify the  
cairo backend to use (surface and font), from GRASS?  From the GRASS  
docs, it looks like file extension sets surface backend.

I had one problem with 64bits with quartz font backend.  But until the  
64bit OSX bug in GRASS is fixed, this is not a big deal.

---

That's where I left off.  I'll get a build script made for cairo and  
put it on my site as soon as I can.

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.