Re: [xougen] Re: [Xouvert-general] Network transparentcy and modules

[Jonathan Walther]

On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 12:03:44PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Sound does not need to be handled in the X server, full stop. A sound 
> server is quite fine - look at aRts, esd, etc. At least esd, and 
> probably others, are quite capable of having clients on remote hosts - 

I wouldn't be so confident about that.  Historically, the X11 standard
doesn't allow sound, so we have always used sound servers.  But they
have incompatibilities, and differ from box to box, and applications
need special support for them.

Consider this; if X is a video server, fine.  But it is not.  It is also
a keyboard and mouse server.  In other words, the X server is intended
to make all "desktop" hardware accessible over the network.  In modern
times this has come to include sound.

Unless X12 is in the standards planning stage, at the moment all I can
think of is possibly a "sound" extension being added to the X server,
possible as a separate loadable module.  This is something that should
probably be discussed over on freedesktop.org; Xouvert will be happy to
implement and distribute such an extension as soon as the spec seems
somewhat reasonable and usable.

> The point is that X doesn't interact with sound hardware at all, and 
> personally I don't see any reason why it should.

Hear hear.  And we should take out X support for the mouse and keyboard
as well. They really bloat the code; ideally X should just give you
network access to a raw video buffer, and you should use separate mouse
and keyboard servers for purposes of stability and to reduce code bloat.

In case you didn't catch on, that last paragraph was a joke.

Jonathan

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