A Call For Improving Cairo Rendering With Its Own Test Suite No Longer Even Passing

GNOME developer Federico Mena-Quintero has made a call to action for trying to get some support for improving Cairo, the widely-used 2D rendering library. Its own test suite is no longer passing with interest in Cairo seeming to wane these days.

From the GNOME side, Cairo is still heavily relied upon for 2D rendering by components such as librsvg. While Federico was investigating some Cairo crashes, he realized Cairo's very thorough test suite isn't even passing itself. It's not even passing with Cairo's pure software-rendered test suite that should theoretically always be working.

He found while there were 497 test passes, there were 54 failures of which only 14 were expected. Some of these test case failures are just subtle rendering differences that humans may not notice any difference but in other test cases it's less clear how the rendering broke.

Federico Mena-Quintero has now setup continuous integration for Cairo to run tests after every commit in hoping catch some problems in the future. He's issued a call for help if you are interested in improving Cairo and getting it back on track.

This vector graphics library is used widely outside of GNOME from the X.Org Server to WebKit to Inkscape to Mozilla Gecko to dozens/hundreds of other programs and project. Unfortunately, it's long been short on manpower considering it's such an important piece of the Linux desktop stack.