xlib + xcms

[Jamey Sharp]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 04:52:21PM +0100, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Daniel Stone <daniel at freedesktop.org> schrieb:
> > On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 04:08:02PM +0100, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> > > I've just noticed that there're a few packages, which require
> > > XCMS in libX11 (in fact, just seen it @ cairo), but I normally
> > > use to do minimal builds.

If you have a list of these packages, could you send it to me? My belief
was that there was absolutely nothing using that code: the CMS bits even
had a bad bug in them for a while that nobody reported.

> > You don't get to remove pieces of Xlib's API.  Full stop.
> 
> hmm, if the xcms stuff (also xkb, etc) is part of the official 
> specification, we probably could go some steps further, split off
> xlib into smaller libs and pull them together to libX11.
> Those applications who need the traditional interface, simply
> continue to import libX11, but newer ones can import it piece
> by piece.
> 
> Would be a nice thing for embedded systems.

It's a fine idea, which one could take in two directions. One option,
which I think you're proposing, is to change Xlib's build process to
make separate libraries from the existing, unchanged, code, and make
libX11 a 'katamari library'. (That seems like an accurate description of
Xlib anyway...) I think that's a good idea for the short term, if
somebody wants to do the work.

Or we can design new and better APIs for those parts of Xlib that
actually get used, and provide migration paths for existing code. That's
the goal of XCB (http://xcb.freedesktop.org/), and embedded systems are
certainly one of XCB's targets.

Components like XCMS might well be replaced by more general libraries
that already exist, such as LittleCms. XIM is being supplanted by
several projects including UIM and SCIM. And let's all hope that XOM
dies in favor of Unicode and Xft.

In the long term I think the second plan is where we're going.

--Jamey
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/attachments/20060321/af6008db/attachment.pgp>