Re: experimental proposal

DD> My plan is to do some experiments to see if a so-far unused mechanism
DD> that the X11 protocol creators provided would provide a better way of
DD> achieving than adding on a bunch of ad-hoc extensions or creating
DD> unnecessary incompatibilities.  The mechanism I'm referring to is the
DD> protocol minor version number.

David,

Unless I'm missing something, it's a horrible idea.

Using the version number does have a significant drawback: extensions
live in a rich name space, while protocol versions live in a linear
numeric one.  While nothing prevents XFree86 from having its
extensions and, say, Sun theirs (and of course XFree86 implementing
the more reasonable among Sun's extensions), bumping the minor
protocol version requires global consensus.

If such consensus fails to happen, there is no solution other than
checking the server vendor string.  Icky.

The obvious reason why somebody would want to bump the minor version
is marketing (we're a more recent version than you), but that's
obviously not a reason that we (XFree86) will ever consider.

The only other reason I can see is that an extension is not allowed to
change the semantics of core requests.  However, that is not something
we're willing to do, especially so as nothing prevents an extension
from mirroring the core requests that it needs to change in its
private name space.

Unless I'm missing something, the drawbacks of your proposition are
sufficiently important, and the advantages sufficiently meager, to
make it a pretty bad idea.

                                        Juliusz