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

Barton C Massey bart at cs.pdx.edu
Fri Jul 16 16:43:57 PDT 2010


In message <4C406A89.7080400 at oracle.com> you wrote:
> Given what I learned on the xwininfo port I took a quick pass across
> the rest of the X.Org app/* modules to see what it would take to port
> each to xcb.

Thanks huge.  That looks like it was a lot of work.

> These depend on libXft, and I'm not sure what to do about that in a xcb
> port:
> 
>     x11perf (plus like rendercheck, we'd still want to be able to use it
>     	     to test libX11 for a while)

I've got a very partial port of x11perf going.  It was what
inspired me to write the xcb_image library.  If someone
wanted to finish it, that would be awesome; I'll dig up the
code.  Otherwise I'll get there "eventually".  I think we'll
need to do some kind of libXft replacement; maybe I'll work
on that.

> These depend on libXt and/or libXaw, which use Xlib types like Display
> in their API, so a pure-xcb-port is not possible without first porting to
> another toolkit (which doesn't seem worth the effort for most of these,
> since there already are similar programs for other toolkits, or doesn't
> make sense since they're specifically for Xt resource management):

>     beforelight, bitmap, oclock, proxymngr, smproxy, twm
>     xbiff, xcalc, xclipboard, xclock, xconsole, xditview,
>     xdm, xedit, xeyes, xfd, xfindproxy, xfontsel, xgc, xload,
>     xlogo, xmag, xman, xmessage, xmh, xmore, xsm, xvidtune

I'd really like to see a lot of these ported, but many of
them are going to require *some* toolkit.  I wish someone
would do XCB-Gnome again and get it into mainline. :-)

Failing that, maybe I need to (get a student to) do a C
version of my Blackboard GUI.  Sigh.  Don't know when I'll
find time...

>     lbxproxy - calls xtrans directly since it's a X11 proxy, plus, it's
>     	     LBX, so it's just special anyway.   (Also, since Xorg no
> 	     longer supports LBX, not widely used anymore.)

Why do we even still ship this?  Just kill it.

>     xpr - only uses XInitImage from libX11

I don't even know what this is.  I don't seem to have one on
any of my computers...

>     xscope - uses xtrans directly to proxy X protocol, printing it on the
>     	   way for debugging - though it would be nice if extension decoders
> 	   could be xcb-generated instead of handcoded

This work has been done for wireshark / tshark, and maybe
for xscope---I forget.

    Bart


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