Re: [xougen] Regarding server side widgets

[weigelt]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 09:01:44AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

hi,

<snip>
> Why? It's an X server, and it seems sensible to stick to the basic task 
> of being a /good/ X server, not a multi-protocol display server. Other 
> display protocols, if any, could easily be handled by an X client doing 
> translation on the same machine as the X server (think VNC).

What about better performance ?

When we someday find a way for doing some important things much better
(i.e. uploading huge textures to the server or working with something 
better than unix sockets), so why should we refuse to do that ?!
Of course the normal X protocol has to be supported (at least as fallback)
on both sides, but if both sides can speak something better, they really
should use it. Those things do not belong into the client code, and should
be completely hidden behind it.

<snip>
> Multi-protocol client support strikes me as excessively complex, and I 
> personally don't see any need. X11 can be a little too low level at 
> times, but this is improved by the RENDER extension, and Xr / Cairo 
> should provide some interesting possibilities as well. The key point is 
> that it can ALL be done with X11 extensions, retaining backward 
> compatability. Why break it when it works well?
If we can put evrything into extensions, than its okay. but perhaps
someday this will not work anylonger, so we should be open for that.

<snip>
> In fact, if you want to write an XWIDGET extension, it might be quite 
> possble within the existing X11 protocol. I really don't know enough 
> about the innards of the protocol to say. 
I also dont, so I'm friend of the multiprotocol variant - so we _can_
put really evryting into the display server.
If I understood it right, 3D support is currently only supported local
(seems like somehow bypassing the Xserver ?). This should also work
remotely. Also I'd like to see an mpeg streaming support directly in 
the Xserver, since many modern cards have hardware acceleration for that.

<snip>
> I've expressed interest previously in built-in VNC support for the X 
> server... but for the X server to provide a VNC server (note overloaded 
> meaning of server) that can be used to view the X server's frame buffer 
> remotely. 
This will be an multiprotocol server, you know that ?

<snip>
> I can't claim to know overly much about Xlib, but from what I've been 
> hearing it's a bit of a pain to code against. So perhaps there's an 
> argument for an "xlib2" or something - but that need not break or even 
Are you talking about an new lib or an new interface ? That's completely
different.

<snip>
> There are a lot of cool possibilities with X11, but it strikes me that 
> the real issues right now are not with the protocol or such, but with 
> driver availability and the difficulty of getting updated drivers for 
> XFree86 as things stand. Xouvert can improve that by providing 
> separately packaged drivers, and IMHO that'd be an important step. 
ACK. The whole distribution should be splitted into smaller packages.
So we i.e. have some Xcommon, Xserver-framework, Xserver-card1, 
Xserver-card2, ..., Xserver-mouse, ...

cu
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