[Xcb] patches from Arnaud Fontaine

[Ian Osgood]

I think it is time to split some of the more useful libraries out of  
util into their own versioned repositories.

1. aux:  most programs use xcb_aux_get_screen(). Most simple-minded  
Xlib ports use xcb_aux_sync() and other convenience functions.

2. renderutil: cairo's XCB backend depends on this now, so it would  
be nice to have it independently versioned.

3. image: Bart's implementation is now mature and featureful enough  
for general use. (One question: do we need a wrapper that hides the  
socket/shm transport mechanism? I'm unclear whether Xlib does this.)

4. atom and icccm: most non-trivial X applications will want these.  
Maybe get a wider API review first.

On Apr 13, 2008, at 6:15 PM, Barton C Massey wrote:

> In message <20080411123836.GC11552 at abydos.adm.naquadah.org> you wrote:
>> I'd like to know what is the current status of the
>> xcb-util maintenance.  None of the recent Arnaud's patches
>> have been commited nor reviewed.
>
> We've reviewed a few on this list; I can't say that I'm
> happy with the degree of review and number of commits so
> far.

BTW, if you want Jamey's feedback you should email him directly or  
use Jabber. He is *way* behind on his mailing lists. He has been more  
invested in the core of libxcb than the outlying convenience  
libraries anyway.

>
> I think the core problem is that util is sort of a dumping
> ground, and no one really cares very much about some of the
> pieces.  As I've said repeatedly on-list, util needs a lot
> of cleanup.

I didn't see a TODO file in xcb/util or its subdirectories. What did  
you have in mind? It would be nice to have a list of things to do so  
we know when we are finished.

> Thanks to the recent copyright patches, I think
> we've at least identified owners and licensing for most of
> the code, but really the only parts of the work that I think
> the core XCB team will be good at maintaining are the parts
> that are really needed to write XCB apps by virtue of being
> replacements for Xlib functionality.
>
>> No need to say that I think Arnaud's doing a great job, and weeks are
>> passing without any action from your part, so would it be possible  
>> that
>> (pick one or more options):
>> - You review Arnaud's work ;
>> - You commit Arnaud's work ;
>> - You state that your not able to take maintenance of xcb-util, trust
>>   Arnaud and give him direct commit access to xcb-util.
>
> Probably what needs to happen is that we need to split off
> icccm and wm from the rest of util and make Arnaud the
> maintainer of it.  I think he's the person currently most
> interested in it, and seems to be making progress with
> it---I'd be up for this.
>
> In the meantime, Arnaud should start the process by cloning
> util, deleting the stuff other than icccm and wm, and
> pushing the result to a private repo on
> people.freedesktop.org.  When we're happy with what's going
> on there, we'll move it back into the canonical tree, and in
> the meantime he can proceed with his work.

I thought Jamey and Josh had written a tool to split a git  
repository. It was used to split the original xcb repository into the  
current four repositories (libxcb, proto, util, demo).

>
>> xcb-util is very nice, but it needs some love. Please let
>> him give it what it deserves.
>
> Fair enough.  Thanks much for the note.
>
>     Bart