<![CDATA[Cairo 1.12.0 – buggy as buggery?]]>Cairo 1.12.0 has been released with a swag-full of new features (such as XCB backend) and improvements. Apparently. For me, it causes random text corruption, noticeable most prominently in Firefox (when built with –enable-system-cairo of course) but also in a few other GTK-based apps. I’ve tried compiling with both GCC 4.7.0, 4.6.3 and LLVM 3.0 without any resolution. Cairo 1.10.2 doesn’t produce corruption, 1.12.0 does. For the moment I recommend holding off on the upgrade.

The situation would be a lot better if Cairo had a halfway decent test suite. It does have a test suite, but when I run it (on 1.12.0 or 1.10.2) I get a huge number of failures which are completely inexplicable to me and apparently to LFS authors also. Quotes from that page:

As the test suite is currently unreliable, it is best to simply skip it at this time.

and

Note that the tests take a long time to run and many of them fail for unknown reasons.

… which pretty much sums up my experience as well. What a joke.

Update: seems I’m not the only one who’s seen this. Not clear at this stage whether it’s really a bug in cairo, in the radeon driver, or the EXA extension.

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