Re: protocol enhancements

David Dawes wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 07:23:28AM -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
>>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.

We've discussed this as well in the X group at Sun - both the need for
sub-pixel resolution (Sun ships several frame buffers that supersample
the pixel space already and store images at subpixel resolutions) and
for a larger coordinate space (I know Xprint isn't that popular, but
we use it in Solaris, and if you're driving a 2400 DPI printer, you're
limited to a 13-inch square paper size unless you move the origin).

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-      [email protected]
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc.   -   Sun Software Group
	 Quality, Integration, & Customer Success (QICS)
	 Platform Globalization Engin. - X11 Engineering