Please take care that "xcb" USE flag is enabled by default on "desktop" profiles and, then, x11-libs/cairo gets built with xcb support if not disabled manually. The problem is that the following message is shown when "xcb" USE flag is enabled: WARN: postinst You have enabled the Cairo XCB backend which is used only by a select few apps. The Cairo XCB backend is presently un-maintained and needs a lot of work to get it caught up to the Xrender and Xlib backends, which are the backends used by most applications. See: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xcb/2008-December/004139.html After reading it and pointed link, seems that xcb backend is "suboptimal" and I am unsure about being better to simply disable it. In that case, wouldn't be better to simply drop that USE flag and disable that old and unmaintained backend? Thanks Reproducible: Always
Huh. We have packages in tree using cairo-xcb, such as x11-wm/awesome. At most, you can get rid of the postinst message and leave things as is.
The state of cario's xcb support is still the same sorry state it was in 2 years ago. The message shouldn't go away. In reality I should have stuck to my guns a long time ago when I ripped out xcb support from the Gentoo cairo package but people complained that they wanted to use awesome and such so I left it with a warning.
That being said, I may consider dropping the note in cairo 1.10 if the backend is supported upstream officially. Right now they close any bugs against the xcb backend if you don't provide a patch since its not supported. That's not something we want to call stable in Gentoo.
Other option could be to rename "xcb" USE flag for x11-libs/cairo to anything else like, for example, "xcb-backend" and, that way, most people wouldn't get that backend build by default and the few packages still relying on it could RDEPEND on that new USE flag :-|. In the end, that backend would be only build when really needed by some other app. What do you think?
Is it possible for me to configure USE defaults such that it ignores the profiles that now default USE=xcb?
(In reply to comment #5) > Is it possible for me to configure USE defaults such that it ignores the > profiles that now default USE=xcb? > Yes, see profiles/base/package.use. That's exactly what openldap does for USE=cxx there.
cairo is on the way to getting properly working xcb support: http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2011-January/021570.html
This is old. XCB with Cairo works fine now days.
