Alternate rendering engines to GD...

[Daniel Morissette]

Tamas Szekeres wrote:
> Yes, we might want to render onto a device context (eg a Win32 GDI screen
> device context) that is somewhat platform dependent and should not directly
> embed into the mapserver code. However Cairo may also provide an abstraction
> level targeting theese type of issues.
> 

Well, even for a Win32 GDI driver the current #ifdef approach would work.

I think the main benefit of the plugin approach is to help with 
precompiled distributions, in the case of output drivers that might have 
some non-free dependencies and cannot be linked in by default, and also 
simply to help redistributing upgrades of plugins without forcing full 
system upgrades.

My 0.02$

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/