[rrd-developers] abstraction from libart

[Gifford Hesketh]

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.

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