In a fit of enthusiasm last weekend, I made debian packages (debs) of the Cairo project sources from CVS in order to get it building for Mono. Cairo is a vector graphics library for cross-device output intended to be similar to PDF 1.4; it was once called Xr.
I mentioned this to the Cairo people last week and, ta da, I'm now maintaining them and have CVS access. The debs for the cairo snapshots are presently hosted on freedesktop.org before they move to the main site, after some server reorganising. So if you add this area to /etc/apt.sources.list with.
deb http://freedesktop.org/~cairo/debian/ ./
you can get a one-line install of the Cairo libraries without dependency hell.
Pushing the stack back to my original goal, Mono is now building for me from CVS, although I can't say I've tested the use of Cairo significantly, Monodoc using GTK# is working, but Dashboard isn't (the main reason I started this journey). Although building Mono from CVS is yet another story...
hacking life
And finally, as the #cairo channel on Freenode was discussing the
hacker glider logo apparel
(proceeds to EFF)
I came up with the hacking life slogan for it. I think
that works pretty well. The logos were, of course, made using
Cairo.