As with all of cairo's major releases, cairo 1.2 retains both source and binary compatibility with the cairo 1.0 series. Programs compiled for cairo 1.0 should run with cairo 1.2 without requiring any modification.

I want to personally express my congratulations and admiration to everyone on the cairo team. This includes authors of code, contributors on the cairo mailing list, and users who have submitted bug reports and suggestions. This release has been a huge effort, and its high quality is due to the contributions of dozens of people---many more than are mentioned below. So thank you!

I would also like to thank everyone for their patience during this long and uncertain release process. I imagine some people may have thought cairo 1.2 would never appear as date after projected date slipped by. I should express particular thanks to Behdad Esfahbod without whom the release still wouldn't be done, nor would it be nearly as good, (many documentation updates, good catches of bad mistakes that almost got frozen in the release, etc). Thanks Behdad!