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Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Picking up the pieces? An attempt...



On Fri, 4 Apr 2008 20:31:30 +0200, Thomas Göttgens wrote:
> Hello,

Hi Thomas,

>   I am no C(++) programmer, nor do i know cairo or wxwidgets well,
>   but i am willing to try to revive this community by supporting a
>   port to the cairo kernel with my available ressources, like server
>   space and employees.

I know cairo, (I have written much of it, and have been maintaining it
for several years). If someone is working on porting Xara to cairo,
then I'd be quite glad to help that person understand the cairo parts
necessary and assist in that effort. (This offer really stands for
anybody writing a free-software application with cairo---we've
assisted inkscape folks as they've started integrating cairo for
example.)

>   is ANYBODY (xara employee or not) still interested in doing this,

I can help on the "how do I make cairo do X" stuff.

>   Do we have a status of the cairo port other than ripping our cdraw
>   and seeing where it complains?

I did one attempt at rip-out-cdraw-and-see-where-it-complains. I never
saw anything happen from that codebase, (but it's possible someone
took it and did more with it, but I just didn't see it).

From what I could see from that effort, the big part of the next step
is just trying to figure out what the CDraw interfaces *are*. (Things
like how many bits are for integer in fixed-point representations, and
things like that.) And those are the kinds of things that will be a
lot easier if there's help from someone who has some familiarity with
Xara internals. But it could also be done with someone good at reverse
engineering an interface given a large piece of C++ using that code
base.

Mostly, it requires the combination of that kind of expertise with
motivation sufficient for doing it all.

It's clearly not impossible to do, but we just haven't seen much
acticity to this point.

Good luck,

-Carl

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