I looked into Luiz' updated headers for Cairo
(http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=11175), and while they are ok in principle (improvements, beautification), the splitting up into multiple units, and some changes like the altered version query function will break backwards compat.

So does sb have any pointers if these headers are already widely used, and compability will be an issue?

This is necessary to cross platform.

and some changes like the altered version query function will break backwards compat.

These are the changes:

cairo_version now is mapped to original library function instead of a customized one.
cairo_get_version_string is renamed to original name cairo_version_string added a overloaded cairo_version function to make easy get the decomposed version
CAIRO_VERSION_ENCODE is removed

These functions are just auxiliary. So no many problems here. One most prominent issue is the fact that the header is based in cairo1.4 version from april 2007 and some dist can have older versions.

Luiz

Nobody else replied, so I assume it is not much used, and compat is not an issue. Will commit it later this day.