moving rootless out of the server

[Peter Hutterer]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 02:44:08PM -0800, Jamey Sharp wrote:
> Just to let you all know: Getting students to build xf86-video-nested
> worked out well, so we're starting another X-related PSU Capstone
> project. This time Jeremy is joining Josh and me as project sponsors.
> 
> The goal this time around is to replace the XQuartz DDX. We'll run the
> stock xfree86 DDX (though Jeremy's patches to make it run in OS X aren't
> all merged yet, I think?) with a video-dummy driver.
> 
> The students' task is to replace the functionality currently provided by
> the server's generic rootless layer and the input and rendering support
> provided by XQuartz, which we're asking them to do by writing a
> compositing window manager that sucks window contents out of the server
> and blits them into native windows. Similarly, for the initial
> implementation they'll use XTest to inject input from native sources
> into the server.
> 
> We hope that the resulting client code can be shared with other
> platforms, so future work may include replacing XWin with a Windows
> version of the same client. It may also be useful to build versions on
> Weyland or another X server. The latter would be different from Xnest
> because it's rootless, which we don't currently have for X nested in X.
> 
> The students are just starting to gather requirements this week. If all
> goes well, their project should complete in late March.

I wonder how much effort it would be to write a xf86-video-vnc that runs on
xfree86 ddx.

Cheers,
  Peter