Re: XFree new feature : "remote" input

Xmove is a neat hack, but it is not a general solution since the clients
don't move themselves; you have to use a proxy server.  You have to know
in advance which clients you might want to move to another server so you
can run them in xmove, or else run your entire desktop through xmove and
have yet another layer in between your programs and the display.  Also
xmove's lack of extensions is a huge disadvantage.  Basically xmove is a
big kludge to get around the problems with X migration.  Here's what
Keith Packard has to say about the subject [ from
keithp.com/~keithp/talks/randr/randr/ ]:

"Proxy server approaches came closest to a general solution, but have
serious drawbacks. For best performance, applications should be
communicating directly with the X server without a proxy. The proxy must
reformat much of the X protocol traffic and even still, ensuring that
the result remains compliant with the X protocol specification is quite
difficult. Even with these difficulties, proxy servers remain useful.
Another problem is the large variation of display sizes [...] Proxy
server based replication can't make applications adapt to this change,
only toolkit based solutions can."

If there was an extension allowing clients to instruct each other to
migrate, perhaps it would encourage the development of migration
capabilities.  It would definitely be nice to have a standard interface
to migration through the X server, because this would allow a VNC-like
app to automatically migrate/duplicate your whole desktop at once.

	James