Comment 149 for bug 512615

@asac:

Sorry it took me so long to reply, here's a little bit about the history of the patch.

The subpixel patch that ubuntu is currently using was added to cairo master during the 1.8.0 cycle, but then dropped shortly before the release [1], essentially because of concerns over the test suite failing on some systems. Ubuntu (and debian, I think) simply reverted the revert, and have been shipping the patch in their cairo ever since, without any issues that I know of. There have been several attempts to re-introduce the feature, the last one this January [2,3], but they have never resulted in a new patch, partly because it is not clear how upstream wants to solve this (Carl is quite unreasonable on this issue, in my opinion). See also the upstream bug.

The patch is very well-tested and the outcome is generally preferred to the legacy filter, so it's hard to imagine mozilla rejecting it.

[1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/cairo/commit/?id=5d887ad5dca5af0f8216830d1b04d08a5aba9bee
[2] http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2010-January/018778.html
[3] http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2010-January/018870.html
[4] http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10301