I know this has been covered to some extent, but I was interested in testing some different graphics backends and find that rrdtool is actually rather tightly coupled to libart.
As has been shown, there is not necessarily a performance gain to be had, but perhaps there are other reasons to maintaining a higher level of abstraction. I can think of a few off the top of my head: 1. libart is relatively unmaintained The author has been busy with his thesis, and gnome developers seem to be leaning toward cairo (at least Novell's mono team). 2. other packages may offer more features For some, it may be desirable to sacrifice some performance in order to gain more capability. I do not know how the performance of ImageMagick, for example, compares with libart, but ImageMagick offers many more output formats. 3. some platforms may offer analogous features natively It may be a stretch to call GDI+ "native" to Windows, but I can imagine a GDI+ version of rrdtool with no freetype, libart, libpng, or zlib dependencies. 4. some people may want a feature-limited rrdtool I might want an rrdtool that only emitted SVG, for use with either an external rasterizer or an SVG-enable Firefox. I have been reviewing rrdtool, libart, cairo, and GDI+ and have some specific suggestions to make, if they would be useful. -- Unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Help mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archive http://lists.ee.ethz.ch/rrd-developers WebAdmin http://lists.ee.ethz.ch/lsg2.cgi
