Re: non-x window manager

[Banlu Kemiyatorn]

Rogelio M.Serrano Jr. wrote:

> is there a gnustep window manager that uses only gnustep-gui? no x 
> dependency at all.
>
> Is it possible to create one?

window manager has x dependency by itself. but I think you mean 
windowing system.
basicly, for a non x-dependency window manager-like thing, you'll have 
to implement
a layer that can wrap the windowing system's api (either X11,directfb,Y) 
with GSDisplayServer [1]
which is an abstract class. For directfb, AFAIK, it is easiest to have 
only one process managing
the current resource so you'll need a complete window system wrapper 
that communicate
to other applications. It's hard to explain. I will show some graphics 
that explain this.

http://www.nongnu.org/woom/images/documents/woom_diagram.png

From this diagram, the application clients will have a small backend 
that will form a communication
layer between the clients and the window server. From this model, to add 
a support to any system,
I must write a WMDevice for that system. eg. WMDirectFBDevice. And to 
draw on
each window device, it must either uses libart or cairo for PostScript 
operations. With X11, this server will
create a window with X api, with opengl, it will create a single window 
and map all opengl window into it.
For the rest, it will not need any window manager if you only want to 
run GNUstep apps.
(Note that I am not saying that this model is better than current model 
that applications actually own
their window in anyway, it was just made with purpose of being a OpenGL 
windowing system)

I have a seperate plan for a window manager for x11 in addition the the 
project above. It was Kika-ka
(previously known as WOOM[2] but WOOM became something else I mentioned 
above) which..
will be done in a form of x11 backend extension that will be able to 
manage other X11 applications
and use AppKit for any dialogs and decoration. The plan of Kika-ka was 
to write a wrapper over XGServer (x11-back)
and let it processes events that belong to window manager before passing 
the rest to the application body.
This will required that only one app has to use Kika-ka as the backend. 
(Thus, others may fall back
to the code that isn't a window manager, but it isn't safe because you 
can't just quit the first application
you run because it became a window manager.)

But after all. I'm too busy with another project of cloning photoshop. 
So I suspended all these tasks
and the only thing available is a bunch of cairo-backend code (working 
already but without text support)
which I planned to reuse it later in the window system above. The 
cairo-backend will be eventually
maintained after Cairo's api is more stable and when I know better how 
text system exactly work.

[1] http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/gui/GSDisplayServer.html
[2] http://www.nongnu.org/woom/