Our SVG renderer librsvg seems essentially unmaintained.
The only commits for more than a year now were mainly build fixes and some minor code optimizations as you can see from GIT log [1]. No render bugs were fixed since a very long time. A decent amount of patches accumulated in the GNOME bugtracker [2], but nobody seem to be committing them. I tried to contact the developers by mail to ask if they could commit some patches but didn't receive an answer (see [3], which is a thread on GNOMES development mailing list I posted regarding the issue but didn't produce any really useful input either).
Since we have a huge amount of librsvg bugs downstream [4] - some of them quite nasty - and none of them has the slightest chance of getting solved without librsvg development continuing - I hereby ask to find a solution for this problem. Since this actually blocks many bugs, I also adjusted the priority accordingly since I think this problem needs to be addressed as quickly as possible. I could think of three options right now (but maybe someone else has other ideas):
- Get bug 38010 fixed (Re-evaluate librsvg as SVG renderer on Wikimedia wikis)
- Recruit a WMF employee or a volunteer with commit rights to GNOME Git who maintains librsvg for us
- Establish contact to the current maintainers (and hope they'll have some spare time to donate for the good of Wikipedia).
[1] https://git.gnome.org/browse/librsvg/log/
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=patchreport.html&product=librsvg&patch-status=none
[3] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2013-April/msg00313.html
[4] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?component=SVG rendering
Version: wmf-deployment
Severity: major
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38010