[Xcb] Porting the rest of the X.Org apps to xcb

[Alan Coopersmith]

Vincent Torri wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> At least at a quick glance, I think these could be fairly straightforward
>> to port to XCB, though whether it's worth the effort for all of them is
>> debatable:
>>
>>    backlight, ico, xcmsdb, xcompmgr, xdriinfo, xhost, xinit, xkill,
>>    xrandr, xrdb, xrefresh, xrestop, xsetroot, xshowdamage, xstdcmp,
>>    xvinfo, xwd, xwud
> 
> Arnaud Fontaine wrote an XCB-based composite manager. Is it necessary to
> port xcompmgr ?

It's not necessary to port any of these, and certainly ones for which there's
already a good xcb replacement are not that useful.

I suppose I left out my thinking about why it's useful to port the X.Org apps
to xcb.   Clearly the mainstream distros are going to have to ship libX11 until
approximately the end of time_t - there's just too many thousands of existing
applications out there from the last 25 years.   I could see embedded or
minimized systems being able to get by without libX11 in the not-too-distant
future, once we get all the software they need to use ported (and I'd think
they're more likely to use modern/maintained software from GNOME, KDE, etc.
than our ancient Xaw sample apps for their core desktop software) - from the
above list the top priority for that would probably be xinit.

But every app we port ourselves gives us more insight into what is needed to
port apps, and figure out how to make it easier for authors/maintainers of
the much more complicated apps out there in the rest of the world.  From the
xwininfo port, at least I learned that a set of functions to convert properties
between the various encoding types (STRING/iso8859-1, COMPOUND_TEXT/iso2022,
UTF8_STRING) would be very useful to save replicating that in every program.
I imagine porting xrdb would give some similar insight into what's needed for
all the Xlib helper functions around resource management.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System