Re: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 04:38:21PM -0500, Mark Vojkovich wrote: 
>    Anyhow, to sumarize.  The requests coming from the desktop
> people don't really line up with the way the hardware is heading.
> So you either don't get everything you want, or you get it in
> software. 

To me the desktop people don't generally have an opinion about RENDER
on the level of detail that you're complaining about it. Most of us
will never use the render API directly. What we would want are high
level things like:
 
 - a way to alpha composite an image onto the current background
   without sucking the background off the server

 - a way to do vector graphics that produces the same results on both
   client and server side

 - a way to avoid redrawing the window manager frame and client window 
   in two different visible steps

 - a way to keep a magnified region of the screen up-to-date without 
   polling XGetImage() at some interval

In general we're fine with "fast enough" rather than "blazingly fast,"
and "a way" instead of "a perfect way," so sometimes software is
fine, sometimes somewhat odd APIs are fine. Oddness that we can bury
in the toolkit is generally not an issue, oddness that leaks out to
app developers is more of an issue, oddness that leaks out to users is 
a largish issue.

As I said earlier, most things that feel clunky right now are more
about client side performance or flicker/tearing/lack-of-animation
than about raw server performance.  Raw server performance is most
important to people doing 3D and other dedicated apps, rather than the
desktop. So performance isn't necessarily the primary issue for some
of this stuff.

Usually the things we're asking for on the desktop are things Windows
or OS X already have, so they should at least be possible, I would
think. And for things that are only possible with *some* hardware,
feature tests can be fine too. (Just as you check for an extension.)

In any case, the thing to do is probably to get more people involved
in new designs. What does the hardware look like? What did it look
like 3 years ago, what will it look like in 3 years? What API do we
want? How does all that interact? etc. Engineering is about tradeoffs,
just a matter of collecting all the data.

Havoc