[Xorg] ARGB visuals from Composite extension

[John McCutchan]

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 19:46, Soeren Sandmann wrote:
> John McCutchan <ttb at tentacle.dhs.org> writes:
> 
> > Both of those are bugs in mozilla and flash.
> 
> The one about crashing is; they should figure out a way to agree on
> the visual used. But I'm not sure about the other. A client faced with
> a 32 bit visual with 8 bits of r, g and b is not required to do
> anything special with the remaining 8 bits, right? So the X server
> suddenly assuming they are alpha bits is not backwards compatible.
> 

Of course its not backwards compatible. Like I said composite is
EXPERIMENTAL.. so users of it should expect things to not work
perfectly. Users *have to turn this on*, so it is not going to break
anyones desktop out of nowhere. Mozilla/Macromedia/Whoever should take
this time period to fix there apps to work with future versions of X
with the composite extension.

> > I think this comes down to who is the leader? X.org or macromedia (could
> > be any program/company)? 
> > 
> > Who sets the rules?
> 
> How do you propose an application predicts that previously unused bits
> are suddenly going to be interpreted as something the application has
> never even heard about?
> 

I don't. But they need to adapt to these changes. We shouldn't work
around there problems. 

I would even go as far as to say that any app that doesn't get fixed
during the experimental phase of the composite extension should probably
be abandoned by it's users -- it is obviously unmaintained.

John