lack of standardization on X11 (was Re: X Gesture Extension protocol - draft proposal v1)

[Peter Hutterer]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 06:31:54PM +0300, Tiago Vignatti wrote:
> (starting a new thread to not mess with the things) 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 01:41:17AM +0200, ext Chase Douglas wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 09:05 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> > > On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 1:13 AM, Chase Douglas
> > > <chase.douglas at canonical.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >                            The X Gesture Extension
> > > >                                  Version 1.0
> > > 
> > > Are you shipping v1 in Ubuntu already? if so how are you going to deal
> > > with incompatible v1 if someone thinks X.org should ship with this.
> > 
> > We're shipping with what I would call 0.5 in Ubuntu 10.10. This protocol
> > proposal is a result of the issues we found in our current
> > implementation.
> 
> One of the benefits to write any protocol in stone is because a plenty of use
> cases was thought for while, which theoretically could be used by lot of
> application and consumers.
> 
> Everyone knows that we're not using X core protocol anymore and we're abusing
> its extensibility feature. In MeeGo + QT 4.7 we're using around 15% of the
> core protocol only. This all means we can play and juggle with the protocol
> for anyone needs, adding and killing X extensions.

"abusing"? i'd call it "using", it's the whole point of extensions. and
using 15% of a protocol that's in part designed around graphics hardware
over two decades old is still a pretty high number...

> Now, the major problem is that we start to have a bunch of different
> applications, each one using X differently. Ubuntu 10.10 employing one way to
> do gesture, Ubuntu 11 another one, MeeGo another one and so on. That's silly!
> We should be using the same basis set of system applications instead.
> 
> We're lacking standard.
>
> > To ensure we have as little protocol incompatibility as possible, we
> > have not published the maverick protocol publicly.
> 
> Chase, I don't think your extension is doing something wrong at all. I'm just
> trying to call some attention about where we're going if we keep doing this
> extension juggling. Something we need to think about.

As somebody who's written an extension to input-related things I can tell
you that until you start using it (both with devices and from applications),
any proposed extension must be questioned anyway. So at some point you will
just have to implement it and throw it out into the wild.
I don't think 1.0 is a good version number to begin with but really, it's
just a number.

Cheers,
  Peter