protocol enhancements

On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 07:23:28AM -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
>> committed to continuing to work on older X servers, and nobody is
>> going to go the X12 route (break back compat). So new stuff is always
>> either a library you can install regardless of your X server
>> (e.g. fontconfig) or an extension that we use only optionally
>> (e.g. RENDER).
>
>Both Gtk and X11 are going to break horribly in the next few years and
>there is going to be a need for X.org, XFree or someone to actually fix
>the standards to allow over 65535 pixels width and height. Otherwise you
>are not going to be able to run X11 on your walls or on ultra fine
>resolution displays.

Absolutely, and I'm glad to see someone else thinking about future
hardware/technology.  This is an issue I've been trying to get some
traction on internally, but it has been difficult.  For example,
the responses I get (from Jim and Keith in particular) are like
"that's not relevant, and won't be for 5-10 years", and "it will
break the protocol", etc.  That's very short-sighted.  Xinerama
with enough high-res screens can come close today (I can never
remember if the limit is 32767 or 65535).  I'm sure that there'll
be other issues exposed as we start working towards this.  I'd like
to see at a minimum that the X server internals, and any proposed
re-writes thereof in the context of 5.0, are prepared for this and
for deeper and non-integer pixel types.  I also think that bumping
the protocol minor revision should be explored as a backward-compatible
mechanism for enhancing the core protocol.  For those who don't
know, the X11 protocol has a so-far unused provision for a
client/server protocol handshake, and this type of detail can be
embedded in Xlib.  There's no need to go to "X12" to do this, or
to keep tacking on miscellaneous extensions to deal with what are
core protocol issues.

David
-- 
David Dawes
Release Engineer/President                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes