Hello colleague, 1 - you miss that actually Cairo.jl defines text setting with the 'toy' interface and setting via pangocairo. text uses a pango layout, set_text uses the cairo-only interface. I think used both already and fed fontfiles into pango. 2 - maybe/maybe not. In general i'd rather split into pure Cairo (with only the toy interface) and a full Pango implementation which is at the moment partially in Cairo and (interestingly) in Compose.jl 2a - why? If you counter library functions, just keep the name. If you build layers on top of it, it should be reasonably clear. If you change something in Cairo.jl be aware that is in the plotting world (Gadfly and similar) a rather heavy dependency. They will not like if you change names of current functions without reason.
2b+c You could do a work-in-progress (put WIP into the name) pull request, so people can comment and even try.
