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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

Is this all gnome projects?

I submitted my first patch to Cairo a few weeks back and depressingly it was met with tumbleweed. I tried contacting people on irc but again, nothing.

In contrast I submitted my first patch to fontforge recently too (GitHub) - it was merged in a couple of hours.

Developer interaction matters and I know plenty of open source devs who have put in a lot of good work are going to hate me for saying this - but those old platforms you're using suck for fostering community contributions. (And I thought the code quality in Cairo was great - I bet if it was on GitHub there would be loads more activity)

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> I submitted my first patch to Cairo a few weeks back and depressingly it was met with tumbleweed

There used to be a time (from what I've read) when free software meant a tarball available for download every n years. Apparently, Open Office under Sun was very good at not accepting patches at all.

Things are looking up though. Please don't give up. Look at the comments on previously on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14051106

Now, we have things like KDE Neon with git-unstable and git-stable which basically allow end users to participate in the latest changes in KDE and now the windows/meta/super key actually does something in KDE which I wouldn't know if I was on Kubuntu.

Any details on that last point? Pretty curious what they're doing with the meta key!

Tbey merely introduced modifier-only shortcuts.

So you can bind a menu, or an application launcher, such as the start menu, or app dash, to Super.

cairo is a hard dependency of GNOME, but it's not really a GNOME project, and it currently is pretty lacking in maintainership since Google hired up practically all of the maintainers to work on Skia/Chrome.

You might want to try shooting Bryce Harrington an email directly to see if he can review your patches. Good luck.

Are there any big users of Skia outside of Google?

Sounds like the Skia team has all the talents and is very well funded, so I'm a little surprised that it failed to catch on (outside of Google).

From what I recall, Skia's not an API stable library - it's seen more as an implementation detail of Chrome/Android - so adopting it as a Google outsider is... not easy.

This seems to be a pattern with Google/Chromium projects. NaCl for example is very cool and potentially broadly applicable as a sandboxing tech, but last I looked would be very difficult to untangle from Chromium, and all that work could be undone at any moment by a Chromium-internal change.

Seems to be used by Firefox. Seems to only have a C++ api. Which might limit adaptation, although I suspect that most potential users might be using C++ anyway.

Edit: Servo has rust bindings for it, so they might also be using it.

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