I was simply wrong (this bug hasn't been fixed in cairo-1.0.4). Since the bug is really nasty (the PDF document needs 330 seconds to be opened on my computer, but only one second with the bug fixed), wouldn't it be worth to consider merging the patch back to the 1.0.x series?
The problem is that the bug you linked to does not have a patch. Most probably it's not a simple bug, but has been fixed because of lots of rewrites that have went into HEAD. Those things cannot be backported to 1.0 branch, no.
If you happen to track it down to a simple patch that fixes your problem, I will consider merging it.