Rebuilding cairo on RHEL 6
 

Hello folks!

A little background:

At home I run Arch Linux and use the i3 window manager.
At work they have us running RHEL 6 with GNOME or KDE installed by default. I do not care for either (Especially after working with WM's like i3 and awesome).

The version of i3 in EPEL is 4.01, while the current stable version of i3 is 4.4. There are quite a few bug fixes and features added between 4.01-4.4 so I would like to use 4.4.

The problem with that is that 4.4 requires cairo to be built with xcb support (enable-xcb). The workstation has cairo 1.8 with no xcb support. I know how to rebuild cairo or to build it from source with xcb support. My question to you is: how do I do so without breaking things? Currently there is quite a long list of packages on this workstation that require cairo as a dependency, and I don't want to just remove/rebuild/upgrade cairo without first knowing how to avoid breaking all those packages that require it.

It can be done , it is not easy but doable .
BUT and it is a big one
replacing cairo on RHEL6 might "null and void" your red hat support contract
so
contact RHEL tech support for the procedure

John VV,

Thanks. I actually ended up building cairo from source with xcb support to /opt/cairo-with-xcb and left the pre-existing cairo package as it was. I then statically linked i3 before compiling to /opt/cairo-with-xcb instead of the default cairo package and it worked out quite well.

Marking this as solved.