[openbox] Render with Cairo

[Clay Barnes]

On 02:14 Wed 04 Apr     , eveel wrote:
> Yen-Ju Chen wrote:
> >I wonder whether OpenBox has plan to use Cairo for rendering ?
> >Although it is another dependency, it is very common now.
> >I think it will make drawing a lot easier for OpenBox.
> 
> Openbox is a lightweight window manager that tries to Keep It Simple, 
> isn't it?
> 
> Cairo is useless in openbox.

Cairo is a solution looking for a problem in OpenBox---namely, it's
great for hardware accelerated drawing, which is a big help if your
window manager does a lot of slow drawing operations.  If, on the
other hand, you're using OpenBox and a P2-266 can keep up with drawing
on the screen and the bottleneck for performance is always the
applications you run, then there is no benefit to adding Cairo, and a
lot of downsides:
1) Increased code complexity.
2) More dependencies.
3) Bigger packages/source tarballs.
4) Higher barrier to entry for new coders.
5) ... and many others.

It just doesn't make sense.  Hope this (slightly more cheerfully)
answers your question.

Of course, if you really want to add Cairo, you're welcome to fork
OB3, but don't expect to get the changes into the main source tree
unless you can prove their _necessity_ (not usefulness!).

-- 
Clay Barnes