Re: About our effort at NoMachine

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 11:55:33PM +0100, Gian Filippo Pinzari wrote: 
> The interface for async replies in Xlib is difficult to use and,
> so, nobody is using it. I suggest a simple mechanism to handle
> reply notifications as events. We did this in NX and it works very
> well. In practice you get a event when a reply is ready (i.e. has
> been received from remote side) then client can call a function
> to get the reply and its data. This is simple to handle for most
> existing clients as it is trivial to plug in the usual event loop. This
> mechanism was used for GetImage requests, then we got rid
> of it completely when we switched to a fb at X client (agent)
> side.

What I've always wanted is just a way to ask for PropertyNotify with
the new value included in the event, about as you say.

As Jim says metacity has a hack now using the Xlib async stuff, that
chills out the number of GetProperty a good bit.  I haven't migrated
all the code over to the new framework so metacity isn't yet using the
batch GetProperty as much as it could be.

You could probably cut down on a lot of GNOME's GetProperty stuff in
one go by fixing libwnck to use the metacity GetProperty code.

Havoc