pixman [LSARC/2008/637 FastTrack timeout 10/22/2008]

[James Carlson]

Alan Coopersmith writes:
> "pixman is a library that provides low-level pixel manipulation
> features such as image compositing and trapezoid rasterization."

Nature abhors an unrasterized trapezoid.  ;-}

>       This ensures that binary incompatible versions can be installed
>       in parallel.  See http://www106.pair.com/rhp/parallel.html for
>       more information

That doesn't work as a precedent for Solaris (and probably not for any
other OS with dynamic linking).  The problem is that it runs right
into the well-known single application address space problems.  An
application can easily end up with a melange of library versions
colliding with each other through no fault of its own, and this scheme
just enables that failure mode.

I hope we're not really planning to apply it here.

> We don't expect most user applications to consume this library - the
> expected consumers are the Xorg graphics drivers and the Cairo drawing
> libraries, so Volatile stability does not appear to pose a hardship
> to a significant number of consumers.

That seems like the good part.  ;-}

> /usr/lib/libpixman-1.so.0			Volatile

Wouldn't we ordinarily call this something like "libpixman.so.1"?  (It
looks like this is an Ubuntuism, and other systems have it installed
differently ... *sigh*.)

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive        71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
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