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

[Vignatti Tiago (Nokia-MS/Helsinki)]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 12:28:45AM +0200, ext Peter Hutterer wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 06:31:54PM +0300, Tiago Vignatti wrote:
> > 
> > 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...

we're abusing, yes!

When someone constructs a protocol that you can manipulate it for adding and
removing pieces as much as you want, without use the core protocol, then in my
opinion is shameless abuse.

The whole point to create a consistent protocol is the life time that it will
last. Right now I don't see any consistency between X applications that I'm
building today with the ones we had in the last decade. I cannot run both in
the same X server. I even doubt I can use today's X app in the upcoming 2 or
3 years server.


And regarding these 15%, I'm getting the ceiling :) We're still doing some
wrong operations (e.g. applications using Render, server *sigh* fonts,
misusing XPutImage/XShmPutImage and etc), which is not what was supposed to be
for our system. I'm pretty sure we're going get something around 5% sometime
soon if those apps are tunned correctly. I'll be posting the results...

 
> 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.

yep, I can imagine the trouble you had prototyping and implementing it :/ BTW,
I found pretty funny the way you and Chase are releasing these drafts without
share any implementation yet. I guess you're intentionally riding so far to
not confuse even more people's mind? :) I mean, the hard part is to design the
spec, while the implementation is just a detail :)


Cheers,
             Tiago