Re: Future features (was Re: Discussing issues)

On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 05:18:35PM +0200, Egbert Eich wrote:
> Alan Hourihane writes:
>  > >  - right now we have a bunch of keymaps that come with the GNOME
>  > >    keyboard switcher applet.
>  > > 
>  > >    I think the idea of a "Swedish keyboard keymap" should probably 
>  > >    come with X instead, so that these little applets are just 
>  > >    a GUI widget that sends some request to the server or invoke 
>  > >    some library. Then there's only one place you have to fix the
>  > >    keymap.
>  > >
>  > >    I don't know a lot about this, I just see the keymaps coming with
>  > >    an applet and think "gee that is really wrong" ;-) maybe 
>  > >    XFree86 already contains a better way to do it and the applet 
>  > >    is just hosed.
>  >  
>  > If the keymap is part of GNOME, I can't see the reason for including it
>  > in X. Doesn't the xkb keymaps that already exist in X fit your current
>  > bill anyway ?
> 
> We should really take a look at these keymaps. Adding keymaps on top
> of xkb really doesn't make sense. We should have keymaps for most
> cases one can think of. Ivan Pascal <[email protected]> would be 
> the expert to talk to.
> 
>  > 
>  > >  - I would like to see a remote desktop feature work "out of the box,"
>  > >    Alan I mailed you about this a while back, here is a mail that
>  > >    includes the notes I made on that:
>  > >    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00221.html
>  > > 
>  > >    I realize xf4vnc exists, but something folded into XFree86 upstream
>  > >    would be a plus. libvncserver or functional equivalent would also
>  > >    be nice to have, if not as part of X, at least readily available.
>  > >    Ideally if the server side is a VNC server it would use the same
>  > >    libvncserver as any client side VNC server, so that features can be
>  > >    added in one spot.
>  >  
>  > GPL code won't make it into XFree86 at all. That's why xf4vnc exists. 
> 
> But from what you told me in NY, I gathered that you've got everything
> modularized pretty well so it should be easy to build this stuff 
> separately and just drop it in as another module.
 
Right, but I still need somewhere to host the source code. And it won't
go in XFree86's CVS. As for the modularization, yes, there's a vnc.so
which is the module. But there's still the standalone Xvnc Xserver too.

>  > There are extra things you can do when your inside the Xserver that I
>  > currently haven't put too much thought into if the interface lived on
>  > the client side. I have suspicions that performance wouldn't be nearly
>  > as good, due to events being generated on every damaged region update.
> 
> Do clients always get notified of damaged regions - even when bs is
> enabled?

The remote framebuffer protocol (RFB) is a pretty slim protocol. Basically
if anything changes on the screen, then it's damaged. It knows nothing
about backing store.

>  > 'make World' and then 'make DESTDIR=/yourpath install' is all you need to do. 
>  > 
>  > This shouldn't mess up anything and will install everything from the build
>  > into '/yourpath'. Create a new XF86Config file to use this new path, and
>  > off you go.
>  > 
> 
> This doesn't suffice to test the entire build. Shared libs are
> searched in the default path. You need to set several environment 
> variables - and I suspect some things are erronously hardcoded.

Yep, Maybe LD_LIBRARY_PATH would be useful here, but it's not far off.

ProjectRoot is the other approach.

Alan.