Re: XFree86 5.0 TODO

Sven Luther writes:
 > 
 > For example, i did originally write the glint/pm3 driver to use the
 > alpha channel for masking, but no app used it, and finally Alan rewrote
 > it so that a color key is used, altough you loose one color, thing which
 > would not have happened when using the alpha channel. You may well
 > export as many attributes as you like, the apps need to be handling them
 > all the same, so you have to upgrade the apps to take advantage of it.
 > 
This depends. The driver could also provide a short descritive string.
An application not knowing the attribute could just display this
string. Also knowing the type and range of the attribute's variable
it has every information to display a suitable wiget element.
I agree that there is still the i18n issue. But if the string
cannot be found in a translation table it is better to display
an English  string in US-ASCII than nothing.

 > What is really needed is a good set of standard attributes, or something
 > such.
 > 
 > >  > Or are there really all that much difference between how a matrox and a
 > >  > ati dual head card do it ?
 > > 
 > > Possibly not. But I would not rule out that you want to add something
 > > specific for a certain card where you can be pretty sure no other card
 > > will ever offer it.
 > 
 > I think it is more a generational thing, any new thing that gets added
 > in by one of the graphic companies will soon be copied by the others.
 > Some years ago matrox did stand apart with dual head, but now everybody
 > provides the same functionality, with different ramdacs and such.
 > 
 > Like explained in my mail exchange with Alan, i would like to see
 > complete independant viewport support, possibly with scaling. To have
 > that, you would need to define a framebuffer layout, possibly using
 > RandR to do depth switching and such, and then have a way to attach
 > viewports to them, dynamically. That is, you first attach one
 > viewport/monitor/head to the framebuffer, and can then choose to
 > activate the second head, and have it replicate the whole (or part of)
 > the display for doing a presentation on a video projector for example.
 > You can also have one viewport being a zoomed view of a part of the
 > screen for accesibility reasons and such. I believe such capacity is in
 > all of todays graphic card (it certainly did already exist in the G400).
 > 
 > Finally, we could do what Xv really does, it exports a certain number of
 > fixed functionality and adds support for additional attributes that can
 > be queried and such.
 > 
 > But again, i don't see what much can be added in this area, apart from
 > more precise zooms, higher frequency ramdacs, and more additional heads
 > (like parhelia's 3 headed solution).

Yes, but take a look at some of the config options certain drivers
have, some of them could be made configurable at runtime, too.
I don't only think about video output drivers but also input drivers.
So there always may be some attribute you want which doesn't exist.

Egbert.