Re: [xougen] Dealing with images

[Gian Filippo Pinzari]

On Sunday 07 December 2003 22:23, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Hey, if you can do this as loadable extensions that we can distribute
> separately, then it would make sense to link the extension to the local
> PNG, SVG, etc libraries.  If this is already being done in the lab, how
> about using Xouvert as a base for developement work?  We'd love to get
> something like that out to the masses for testing.

Our X stuff has been designed to not rely on X clients being aware of 
it, mainly because X clients' developers didn't show much interest in 
this. X clients' developers didn't show much interest mainly because 
they didn't see much interest in X core developers, so... This prevents 
a huge amount of optimizations and improvements that should be 
placed in the X clients and the X server, not in the proxying system 
or in another layer on top of X. Migrating this stuff in a standard X 
extension will require a lot of work. Before starting that work I think 
we should agree at least that:

1. X needs it.
2. X applications' developers are willing to use it.

> We definately would at least like to TRY distributing a loadable
> extension that renders images in PNG, JPEG, and SVG formats.  Maybe
> three loadable extensions, one per format.  If people used it, and it
> turned out to show some speed savings (especially over network), that
> would be great.

We are using it and it shows big savings. Anyway I think that a 
loadable module that would require us to ship a X server even on 
platforms where X is standard is not that cool ;-). We need other 
applications using it. This will give users a valid reason to use a
'non standard' X server. It's a complex matter, I know. I believe 
that the first step is to verify that there is a concrete interest in 
working together.

Regards,

/Gian Filippo Pinzari.