Re: experimental proposal

David Dawes writes:
 > I've given it a lot of thought (and you were at the meeting when
 > I discussed it in January), and I believe that the apparent
 > complications can be handled within Xlib, and without causing
 > problems for legacy clients.  But all of this is why I titled this

Yes, exactly. That's what I ment by 'careful design may help to 
spare us from surprises.'

 > message "experimental proposal."  To my knowledge this approach
 > has not been investigated, and I believe that it should be.  Patching
 > up problems with ad hoc extensions is not a scalable solution, IMO.
 > 
 > >Presently X.org is doing standardization for X. 
 > 
 > X.org appears to be doing a good job of maintaining the existing
 > standard.
 > 
 > >Have you addressed this issue there? 
 > 
 > I'm addressing the issue here, in an open forum.  The "standardisation"
 > mantra should not stand in the way of progress, development, and
 > extensions to the core standards.
 > 

Hm, are you implying that you would be willing to create a 'proprietary
version' of the X protocol?  I don't think this is a good idea at all.

X has a good history for going out of its way to maintain compatibility
in both directions. A proprietary change to the core protocol will break
that. Proprietary things should better live in extensions in their own
name spaces.
To bump the version number of the X core protocol a consensus among 
those who ship X is essential. Possibly for this reason this avenue 
has never been explored. Maybe with the new structure of Xorg in place 
it would be feasable to go this for the first time.

Egbert.