Re: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 04:38:21PM -0500, Mark Vojkovich wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Egbert Eich wrote:
> 
> > Havoc Pennington writes:
> >  > IMHO, one thing X.org should do if it wants to reimagine itself is
> >  > expand to include toolkit/desktop level concerns and establish
> >  > contacts with toolkit and desktop developers. X should really be
> >  > developed to meet the needs of the UI, not the other way around.  That
> >  > goes from the top down: user -> apps -> desktop -> toolkit -> X -> OS.
> >  > 
> > 
> > Havoc, 
> > 
> > I do agree with you. However you most not neglect issues t
> > hat are not immediately visible from the UI point of
> > view: you have to consider how you can map a funtionality
> > you propose onto the HW. 
> > 
> > In the past this has not always been taken into consideration.
> > I hope Mark Vojkovitch will give more details on this but
> > to give you two examples:
> > 
> > * Alpha blended cursors have been added with no consideration 
> >   for OpenGL.
> > 
> > * The RENDER extension is nearly impossible to accelerate fully.
> > 
> > Egbert.
> 
>    The cursor issue was fixed a the last minute, so were some
> other problems, but some problems still remain.  In fact, part
> of 4.3's delay was due to regressions caused by the RandR 
> extension not getting fixed in a timely matter.
> 
>   The fact of the matter is that few people realize the implementation
> issues involved in some of these features.  End users say
> they want a particular feature, but specify things in a way that
> is nearly impossible to implement or implement efficiently.
> 
>    Things like RandR really require radical driver model modifications
> to implement in a non-hackish way.  Implications to OpenGL or Xvideo
> still aren't entirely clear.  This can't happen overnight as everything
> needs to fit together coherently and this is alot of work, and work
> that can't really be done by people who don't have experience in
> these areas.  In some cases features were added without sufficient
> considerations.  Desktop people pretty much got to pick their dream
> interfaces with RENDER but this leaves driver people scratching their
> heads as to what they're expected to do about it.  Concerns about
> the useability of the current design were expressed by people like
> Thomas Roell from XiG and myself.  I suppose someday people will
> be complaining that RENDER is too slow and blame the XFree86 project
> for this, though it was really the consequence of end users having
> too much control.

Add to that that Keith never got to it to write some driver writer
documentation or such for it (at the level of the XAA.HOWTO document). I
have been asking him for that since one or two years already, and ever
got responded that it is not yet ready or such, if i got reply, that is,
some of my mails to him got simply ignored. This is the selfsame kind of
behavior that he is now reproaching to the core team.

No offense intended Keith, just giving my impression, but i think giving
better documentation to the driver writer would have helped for getting
driver support for it, and maybe discover some of the problems Mark
speaks about.

Friendly,

Sven Luther