NEWS: Sum up 2 years of development for 1.10.0 in 60 lines

NEWS

@@ -1,3 +1,64 @@
+Release 1.10.0 (2010-09-06 Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>)
+===================================================================
+The cairo community is astounded (and flabbergast) to finally announce
+the 1.10.0 release of the cairo graphics library. This is a major update
+to cairo, with new features and enhanced functionality which maintains
+compatibility for applications written using any previous major cairo
+release, (1.8, 1.6, 1.4, 1.2, or 1.0). We recommend that anybody using
+a previous version of cairo upgrade to cairo 1.10.0.
+
+One of the more interesting departures for cairo for this release is the
+inclusion of a tracing utility, cairo-trace. cairo-trace generates a
+human-readable, replayable, compact representation of the sequences of
+drawing commands made by an application. This can be used to inspecting
+applications to understand issues and as a means for profiling
+real-world usage of cairo.
+
+The traces generated by cairo-trace have been collected in 
+
+  git://git.cairographics.org/git/cairo-traces
+
+and have driven the performance tuning of cairo over the last couple of
+years. In particular, the image backend is much faster with a new
+polygon rasterisation and a complete overhaul of the tessellator. Not
+only is this faster, but also eliminates visual artifacts from
+self-intersecting strokes. Not only has cairo-trace been driving
+performance improvements within cairo, but as a repeatable means of
+driving complex graphics it has been used to tune OpenGL, DDX, and
+pixman.
+
+Cairo's API has been extended to better support printing, notably
+through the ability to include a single compressed representation of an
+image for patterns used throughout a document, leading to dramatic file
+size reductions. Also the meta-surface used to record the vector
+commands compromising a drawing sequence is now exposed as a
+CAIRO_SURFACE_TYPE_RECORDING, along with a new surface that is a child of a
+larger surface, CAIRO_SURFACE_TYPE_SUBSURFACE. One typical usage of a
+subsurface would be as a source glyph in a texture atlas, or as a
+restricted subwindow within a canvas.
+
+Cairo's API has also resurrected the RGB16 format from the past as
+the prevalence of 16-bit framebuffers has not diminished and is a
+fore-taste of the extended format support we anticipate in the future.
+Increasing cairo's utility, we introduce the cairo_region_t for handling
+sets of pixel aligned rectangles commonly used in graphics applications.
+This is a merger of the GdkRegion and the pixman_region_t, hopefully
+providing the utility of the former with the speed of the latter.
+
+Furthermore cairo has been reworked to interoperate more closely with
+various acceleration architectures, gaining the ability to share
+those hardware resources through the new cairo_device_t. For instance,
+with the new OpenGL backend that supersedes the Glitz backend, hardware
+and rendering operations can be shared between a classic OpenGL
+application mixing libVA for the hardware assisted video decode with
+cairo for high quality overlays all within the same OpenGL canvas.
+
+Many thanks for the hard work of Adrian Johnson, Andrea Canciani, Behdad
+Esfahbod, Benjamin Otte, Carl Worth, Carlos Garcia Campos, Chris Wilson,
+Eric Anholt, Jeff Muizelaar, Karl Tomlinson, M Joonas Pihlaja, Søren
+Sandmann Pedersen and many others that have contributed over the last
+couple of years to cairo. Thank you all!
+
 Snapshot 1.9.14 (2010-07-26)
 ============================