experimental proposal

I've been thinking about the following for a while, and even ran it by
the core team at a meeting in Linux World in January of this year (to
a rather cool reception, but they can be a conservative bunch :-).

I don't think anyone argues with the fact that the X11 protocol has some
deficiencies that should be corrected.  The main area of disagreement
seems to be in how best to correct them.

My plan is to do some experiments to see if a so-far unused mechanism
that the X11 protocol creators provided would provide a better way of
achieving than adding on a bunch of ad-hoc extensions or creating
unnecessary incompatibilities.  The mechanism I'm referring to is the
protocol minor version number.  One of the first things that happens
when a client connects to a server is a protocol revision version
handshake.  The first part of this proposal is to see how effective this
mechanism is in practice.

If it does prove effective, then the next step would be to define a set
of protocol fixes/enhancements that would become version 11.1 of the X
protocol, and implement them in our Xlib and X server in such a way that
they are only used when both client and server indicate that they can
speak version 11.1 of the protocol.  On the client side of things, it
should be possible to handle this negotiation completely within Xlib.

If this mechanism proves effective, then it would open the way to
more frequent protocol revision updates as problems/limitations
arise rather than waiting over a decade to deal with them.

At this point, I'm interested in whether anyone has any feedback to
offer on this idea.

Once the 4.4 release is out of the way, I'm planning follow up on
step one.

David
-- 
David Dawes
developer/release engineer                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes