Re: Cairo or Art?

[Hubert Chathi]

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:11:08 +0100, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> said:

[...]
> Note that you can include multiple back ends in the same package.  The
> FreeBSD port builds all three unless you specify otherwise, letting
> you select at run time.  I would recommend including art and cairo,
> enable cairo by default, and include instructions for switching to art
> if people encounter problems.

Debian does something similar, except that the "suggested" backend is
art.  Debian builds one package for the art backend, and one package for
the cairo backend.  Users can install either package, or both, and can
easily switch between the two as the system-wide default.  This is done
using Debian's "alternatives" mechanism, which is more-or-less a fancy
tool for manipulating symlinks.

Hubert (with his Debian Developer hat on)