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

[Mark Kettenis]

> Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:39:16 -0700
> From: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com>
> 
> 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.

Heh, that's reassuring.

> 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.

On the other hand, it is also beneficial to leave some of the core
applications use libX11 to make sure it doesn't suffer too much
bitrot.